Finding Articles - THTR 500 - Bibliography and Research Methods - Research Guides at University of British Columbia

Core Databases

Search for journal articles in some of the Library's many article indexes or databases.

What are the Best Databases to Search?

The Library now subscribes to hundreds of specialized databases that index journal articles, books, book chapters, conference proceedings, dissertations, etc, in different disciplines. Use the same kind of keyword search strategies that you used in the library catalogue. Most databases permit you to set up a free personal account so you can save search results, persistent links to searches, search alerts, journal alerts, and web pages to your personal folder.

Some recommended databases to search for articles about Theatre topics:

International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance with Full Text
International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text (IBTD) is an index to journal articles, books, book chapters and dissertation abstracts on all aspects of theatre and performance. The database contains full text for more than 140 periodicals and 300 monographs.

MLA International Bibliography (Modern Language Association) This link opens in a new window
Indexes scholarly research from 4,400 journals and series pertaining to literature, language, linguistics, folklore, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts (film, radio, television, theatre), and history of printing and publishing. It also covers relevant monographs, working papers, proceedings, bibliographies, and other formats. . Coverage from 1926 to the present.

Gale Literary Sources
Over 1 million full-text articles from scholarly journals & literary magazines, critical essays, topic overviews, biographies, & more to provide a wealth of information on authors, their works, and literary movements.
CBCA Complete
Good source for coverage of Canadian authors and literature.
Arts & Humanities Citation Index (Web of Science)
A multidisciplinary index to the journal literature in the arts and humanities, covering over 1,395 scholarly journals 1975 to the present. Allows searching by author, title word, cited author, journal title, and institution

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a valuable search tool for doing research, especially for finding citation information in the humanities.

If you are using Google Scholar off campus, make sure you go to Google Scholar Preferences and type in UBC so that it will display links when you access full text articles through the library.

Google works with libraries to determine which journals and papers they've subscribed to electronically, and then links to articles from those sources when they're available. Once you indicate what library you're a member of, they will keep an eye out for that library's subscription materials and provide special links to them in your search results.

To make these links appear:

Click on Scholar Preferences
Type the name of your library in the 'Library Links' section
Click Save preferences
Start searching with links to your library's resources (you will need to authenticate yourself to access these resources using EZproxy. All you need is a valid Campus-Wide Login(CWL) or UBC Library Card.)

Try searching "vagina monologues" ensler.

Summon

Summon is the UBC Library's meta-discovery tool that provides a single starting point to find and to access the majority of the UBC Library collections - including books, ebooks, scholarly journals and articles, newspaper articles, dissertations and theses, videos, maps, manuscripts, music scores, digitized items, and more.

When searching Summon, it's important to use quotation marks around phrases.
Compare these two searches: dramatic theory versus "dramatic theory"

Narrow your results to journal articles.

Summon is useful for finding a specific journal article quickly. For example, if you were trying to find Jill Dolan's 2001 article Performance, Utopia, and the "Utopian Performative" published in Theatre Journal, Volume 53, Issue 3, pp.455-479, you can search the article title in Summon: "Performance, Utopia, and the Utopian Performative"

Need Help Finding Journal Articles?

See the UBC Library Guide to Finding Articles. The guide shows you how to search for a known article from a list or in course reserve, find articles on a topic, and what to do when UBC Library doesn't have the article you're looking for.

More Databases

World Shakespeare Bibliography
Provides annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare.
ESTC : English Short Title Catalog
Bibliographic records for works published between 1473 and 1800, principally in Britain and North America. Predominantly English language. Contains almost 460,000 records representing material held in the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries.
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance
A bibliography comprised of secondary source material pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700). Citations for books and journal material are included, as are citations for dissertation abstracts and essays in books.
Nineteenth Century Index
A comprehensive source for discovering nineteenth-century books, periodicals, official documents, newspapers and archives. Provides access to the twelve most important finding aids for 19th century studies, including the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue and Palmer's Index to the Times of London.
Bibliography of Native North Americans
Covers history and culture of Native North Americans; over 80,000 records. Stronger in older ethnological studies than it is in current political studies.
International Medieval Bibliography Online
Journal articles, proceedings, festschriften and other essay collections covering all aspects of the European Middle Ages (c450-1500).
Communication & Mass Media Complete
Full text article database covering communication and language. Useful for articles on language and communication technologies such as texting, MSN, etc.
Victorian Database Online (LITIR)
Covers over 100,000 records listing books, articles, and dissertation abstracts published from 1945 to 1999 on every field of nineteenth-century British studies.
Periodicals Archive Online
Periodicals Archive Online (PAO) offers access to international scholarly literature in the humanities and social sciences disciplines from 1802 to 1995 in thirty-seven subject areas.
Historical Abstracts
Authoritative database provides indexing of more than 2,300 academic historical journals in over 40 languages back to 1955. Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) focusing on the 15th century forward, including world history, military history, women's history, history of education, and more.