Finding Journal Articles on Music
Channel: University of Alabama Libraries
Date: 2020-08-23

This tutorial covers how to discover and access peer-reviewed and scholarly music literature using two library databases - Realm Abstracts of Music Literature and JStor.

https://libraries.ua.edu


Transcript: 

In this video we are going to focus on finding journal articles using the library's databases.
While you will find some journal articles in Scout, certain databases provide more comprehensive coverage of the journal literature on music.
Today I'm going to show you how to use two of the most commonly-used databases for music research: Realm and JStor. 
Realm Abstracts of Music Literature is an index of journal articles, periodicals, books, 
dissertations, and other sources on music.
The search interface in Realm is similar to Scout and is simple to use for keyword searching. For example I'm going to search for information on the opera Carmen using Bizet and Carmen as keywords. On the results page you can select a publication date range and narrow your search results by source type, subject, publication, publisher, or language.
In this case i would recommend selecting academic journals under source types and possibly limiting your search results to English language articles only. Just like in Scout you'll want to look for either the linked pdf or the full text finder icon. Also like Scout you can click the article title to view additional information such as the abstract, which is a summary of the article. From this page you can also access the toolbar.
JStor is another popular database for finding journal articles. It's different from Realm in that it is interdisciplinary, meaning it contains articles on many different subjects,
not just music. It also offers linked full text for all journal articles in the database.
Since JStor is exclusively a full text database, articles published in the last three to
four years may not be available yet. This is something to keep in mind as you compile your bibliography.
When searching in Scout or in library databases you can also use quotation marks to search for a phrase as demonstrated in this search for Schoenberg and string quartet.
With this sample search you will see that JStor returns a large number of search results. For this reason I would strongly recommend using JStor's limiters to narrow your results.
In this case i've selected journals under academic content and music under subjects. You can also limit the publication date range or select other relevant subjects icons to download and cite. Articles are provided on the results page but you can also click on the
article title to view the full text in your browser or to access the abstract, and other information.