Finding Articles -- Good Starting Places
If you need to find a handful of articles on film from respected journal and magazine sources, especially academic/scholarly journals, the databases listed below are excellent places to begin.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Excellent starting point. Multidisciplinary article database offers access to more than 16,000 journals, magazines, and newspapers, including over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals.
- Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Coverage of over 2,000 journals in history, film studies, religion, philosophy, and other fields within the humanities.
- Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson) This link opens in a new window
Offers full text plus abstracts and indexing of an international array of peer-selected publications. The database covers fine, decorative and commercial art, folk art, photography, film, and architecture, and also includes a database-specific thesaurus.
Examples of searches:
- Here is a link to a search for articles on the French New Wave from the Academic Search Complete database: "new wave" AND (france OR french)
- Here is a link to a search for articles on music in Stanley Kubrick's films from the Humanities International database: kubrick AND music*
- Here is a link to a search for articles on documentaries on race from the Art Full Text database: documentar* AND (race OR racial)
Think About Search Terms
Several of the "article databases" to which we subscribe contain large numbers of references to reviews, essays, and other articles about particular movies.
- If you are looking for information on a movie with a very distinctive title, that title probably is the only search term you need. Examples: "big lebowski" or "chimes at midnight"
- However, if the title is not unique and/or it also might be the title of a book, you probably will need to refine your search by including some cinematic terms. Example: crash AND (movie* OR film* OR motion OR cinema)
The asterisk in the above examples generates a search in most databases for various forms of a word (singular, plural, etc.).
If you want to search for a multi-word phrase, as in the Big Lebowski and Chimes at Midnight examples above, enclose the search terms within quotation marks.