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Film & Media Arts

Library Research Guide for the Dodge College of Film & Media Arts.

Find Articles and Reviews

Peer Review

If your professor asks you to find "scholarly" or "peer reviewed" journal articles, be sure the article you find is from a source that has gone through the peer review process. Many databases offer a search filter to limit to only journals that are scholarly or peer reviewed. You can also check the journal title in the Ulrich's database (linked below) to see if a title is peer reviewed. 

 

EBSCO Start Your Search

This portal (below) is best used for multidisciplinary peer-reviewed articles (mainly, secondary sources) and searches across several hundred databases and journals. Start Your Search is a broad first pass into researching one's topic.

Tips:

  • First search portal on library homepage: Start Your Search bar > Advanced Search
  • Use key terms from your research statement and hit Enter
  • Click All Filters > Peer-Reviewed > Apply Filters for critical scholarly works
    • Check off Online Full Text if you don’t have time for Interlibrary Loan
  • Remember synonyms and quotations for further filtering of results
Use Start Your Search to search across multiple databases with a single search.

Multidisciplinary Databases

These databases index articles from a variety of subjects and sources. These are good places to start your research:

Film & Media Arts Journal Databases 

These databases index articles from journals within the subject of Film & Media Arts. These are useful when looking for articles specifically within your discipline:

AFI Catalog

Use the American Film Institute Catalog to find information on films including titles, running times, cast, crew, directors, subject matter, and more. This is a great resource to start with when learning about a film. It also has partial citation information (breadcrumbs) at the end of each article that can help you find film reviews and other articles written about the film. Use the Journal Finder to see if the library has full text of any reviews mentioned in the bread crumbs.

Use EBSCO Start Your Search to Find Film Reviews

Use the following tips to help you find film reviews in Discover!

  1. In the EBSCO Start Your Search link below, type the name of a film in quotation marks (ex. "Gone with the Wind").
  2. You might also try adding the year the film was released and/or the word film (Ex. "Gone with the Wind" film 1939).
  3. Once you have some results, limit your results to the year before through the year after the film was released (ex. 1938-1940). This will limit your results to only items published around the time the film was released.
  4. You may want to limit the source types to newspapers and/or magazines, since these are the types of periodicals that film reviews are usually published in.
  5. Click on the titles to read more about each entry.
  6. If you find an entry that looks like a winner, click the full text .pdf link (if available) or click "Check for Full Text" to cross search other databases for the full text of the review.
Use Start Your Search to search across multiple databases with a single search.

Cross-searching film reviews between multiple newspapers databases within a date range

To search for film reviews across multiple newspaper publications, click "A-Z Databases: Newspapers," and follow the instructions  below:

  1. Select “Chicago Tribune Historical”
  2. Click the title of the newspaper again, “ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune”
  3. Click “Change Databases”
  4. Check off all applicable newspapers you’d like searched (don’t check all databases and pay attention to the parenthetical date ranges)
  5. Click “Use selected databases”
  6. Click “Advanced Search”
  7. Type in your keyword search in quotes
  8. Enter the “Publication date” (to restrict results by date)
  9. Click “Search"

Searching the Internet

You may want to try searching the web for content related to the film or aspect of film & media arts you are researching. Google Scholar (not to be confused with the general Google search browser) is a good place to start looking for articles that may be freely available on the internet. If you do find something you like when searching online and are not able to find it in full text, be sure to check the Leatherby Libraries Publication Finder for the article. You can also request articles you cannot locate in full text through Interlibrary Loan.

Open Access Resources Beyond Google Scholar

Open Access (OA) refers to the free, immediate, online availability of research outputs such as journal articles or books, combined with the rights to use these outputs fully in the digital environment.