Hiram College Library: Theatre: Find Articles

Resources & Services

How do I find Articles?

Use a database (an online index of articles) to help you locate articles for your research paper.

Databases can index all sorts of thinks (Netflix and Spotify are both databases!), but for our purposes today, we'll use them to find articles.

Library staff provide an overview to help you get started using online resources for your research:

Finding Articles

Articles about theatre can be found both in theatre-specific databases and in general purpose databases like JSTOR and Academic Search complete.

International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance This link opens in a new window
Indexes articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations on all aspects of theatre and performance. Coverage goes back to 1984.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Fully searchable full-text of nearly 1,000 scholarly journals. JSTOR provides back files to the first issue of a journal, but stops 3 to 5 years before the current publication year. Covers all disciplines.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary database that indexes and abstracts some 9,300 periodicals, both popular and scholarly. Provides full-text to more than 5,300 journals.

Finding plays:

Many plays, especially shorter ones, appear in collections or anthologies. Use Play Index to identify where plays appear in collections and then check the Hiram College Library catalog or the OhioLINK catalog to see if the collection is available.

Play Index This link opens in a new window
Indexes about 31,000 plays, both published individually or in a collection, from 1949 to the present.

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary database that indexes and abstracts some 9,300 periodicals, both popular and scholarly. Provides full-text to more than 5,300 journals.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Fully searchable full-text of nearly 1,000 scholarly journals. JSTOR provides back files to the first issue of a journal, but stops 3 to 5 years before the current publication year. Covers all disciplines.
Electronic Journal Center (EJC) This link opens in a new window
Searchable, full-text issues of journals from a number of major publishers. More than 7,000 journals are available.
Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Indexes and abstracts some 1,900 periodical titles with some coverage as far back as 1925. Also indexes books, essays, reviews, and original creative work including fiction and poems.
Humanities Full Text This link opens in a new window
Indexes nearly 700 periodicals in the humanities (art, classical studies, dance, film, philosophy, religious studies, and more) with some coverage back to 1910. Full-text is available for more than 330 journals.

Google Scholar
Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. While Google Scholar itself is free on the web, many of the citations it references are not. Accessing Google Scholar via the proxied link will enable Find It! and other Links from within Google Scholar citations.

Film and Television Literature Index This link opens in a new window
Indexes and abstracts some 600 periodicals related to film, film writing, and television. Includes reviews.

Reading the bibliographies of a good article or book can be very helpful. But how do you find one of the sources listed? Look up the part written in italics.

If your citation looks something like the one below, then it's an article. (Hint: You know it's a journal article if you see volume/issue/page #s.)

Morrow, P. ‘‘Those Sick Challenger Jokes.’’ Journal of Popular Culture. 20.4 (1987): 175-84.

Finding it:

   -look up the title of the journal in the OneSource Journal Finder (Note: Look up the journal title, which is in italics, not the "article title," which is in "quotation marks.")
   -if the journal is available electronically, you can search within the journal itself or click on the "Full Text Access" link, and check if we have access to the year you need
   -if the journal is available in print, read the rest of the journal's record to see if we have the volume/issue you need

If your citation looks something like the one below, then it's a book. (Hint: You know it's a book if you see a city and a publisher/press)

Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation; Bellin, Joshua David; 2005, Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press.

Finding it:
-look up the title of the book in the H iram Library Catalog
-if we don't have it, click on the OhioLINK button to find it in another Ohio library

Advanced Search Techniques

The words "AND," "OR," and "NOT" can help you make a search more precise. This is called Boolean searching, and it can seem really intimidating, but once you get the hang of them, Boolean searches can really help you!

For example, the search 'films AND psychology NOT children', will return a search with results that contain the keywords 'films' and 'pyschology' but not 'children' - important if you are only looking at adolescent psychology in films.

Learn more with this guide from the MIT libraries. It really helps explain Boolean searching, and you don’t have to be a computer scientist to understand!

The following video also outlines the ways to use advanced search techniques in databases.

Keyword vs Subject Searching

What's the difference between a keyword search and a subject search? Why should I care? This video explains it all!