Music 528: Problems and Methods in Research  Tags: music musicology research_methods  

Journal articles offer detailed looks at very specific topics. In order to find the article(s) that will be useful within the hundreds of journals available, journal databases allow you to search by keywords or other information. These databases index journals beyond those held at UIUC. While many articles are available online or available in print in our libraries, those that are not can be ordered through InterLibrary Loan (see "Getting full text" below.)

Journal databases

Getting full text

There are many potentially helpful journal databases; here are a few of the best for music. These can be accessed either from the links provided here, the Music Library's Web site, or from the ORR (Online Research Resources) tool.

Current Coverage

IIMP Full Text 

“IIMP” stands for “International Index to Music Periodicals”. It provides indexing and abstracts for more than 400 international music periodicals, plus full text for around 80 journals. Some complete journal runs are included, which cover the first published issue right up to the most current. The database covers a comprehensive range of subject areas in both scholarly and popular music journals ranging from International Journal of Music Education, Ethnomusicology, Jazz Education Journal and Musical Times to Rock and Rap Confidential and Rolling Stone. Articles examine a wide spectrum of musical subjects, including music education, performance, ethnomusicology, musical theatre, theory, popular music forms and composition. Because many journals includes reviews, unless you particularly need review material you should check the “Exclude reviews” box on the search page.

Music Index 

A broad range of subjects are indexed, covering musicological or organological topics, plus book reviews, record reviews, first performances, and obituaries. Over 690 international music periodicals are indexed.

Project Muse

Similar to JSTOR, but contains full text of the most recent years of journals covered. Currently contains eleven music journals, including Music and Letters.

RILM

RILM contains bibliographic information about books, periodical articles, dissertations and reviews published between 1967 and the present day. Advanced Search allows you to limit your search by language (for example, you might only want material in English, or in French); by year of publication (so if you only want material published since the appearance of The New Grove you can restrict your search to items published since 2000); and by publication type, such as “monograph”, or “dissertation”. One big advantage of RILM over most other music databases is that in many cases the database provides you with an “abstract” – that is, a summary of what a particular article or book is about. This is particularly helpful in cases where you have found a lot of references and want to work out which is/are going to be the most relevant.

Historical Coverage

JSTOR

JSTOR is an archive of articles on many topics in the arts and sciences, including music. It contains full text material from 38 music journals, plus one dance journal (Dance Research). It is important to remember that JSTOR is an archive of journals: it does not include the most recent issues of any journal, so if you want access to these you should consult IIMP Full Text and/or the eJournals resources from the ORR. When you first log on, JSTOR looks decidedly unfriendly: just a search box and a cursor. Choose the “Advanced search” option for something a little more helpful. However, please note that JSTOR only allows keyword searches: searching using a structured subject-heading vocabulary is not possible. At present JSTOR is experimenting with an internal reference linking structure so that, for example, if you find a reference to an article in JSTOR that is itself available in JSTOR, you can link directly to it by clicking on the reference. 

RIPM

If you are looking for historical coverage of a topic, contemporaneous composer reception, for example, try this sister product to RILM. It covers many nineteenth-century music journals. For additional music and non-music journals, try Periodicals Archive Online, which covers arts, humanities, and social science journals from the 1700s forward.

Peridocals Archive Online

Periodical archive of the backfiles of periodicals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The scope is worldwide and includes journals in English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and other Western languages.

19th-Century Masterfile

Identifies articles written from the 18th century through early 1920s in many fields including the arts, history, the social sciences, and literature.

UIUC also subscribes to many historic newspaper files (e.g., The London Times) which can have concert reviews and other contemporaneous accounts of 19th century composers and their music. Use the ORR to locate these files.

Finding citations is the easy part, now for the fun of actually locating the items you want to read. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this. You may need to use some or all of the steps outlined below, depending on the item for which you are searching. 

 

1. Online

If you located an item because you were searching in RILM or another journal database, you should look for a link that says "Full text" or "Discover UIUC full text linking." This will, in the first case, open the full text file, or, in the second case, open another window that will list online full text options for this title. A word to the wise, this "Discover" service is not 100% accurate. If you are searching for online options for a journal title, always check the library catalog and the ORR, which will list the online sources for that title. Some journals are indexed in many databases, but the dates covered and full-text availability may vary from database to database.

2. In print

If there is no online source for a journal, search the library catalog to discover what print holdings are available at UIUC. 

3. ILL 

If there are no online or print holdings at UIUC, place an IShare or ILL request for the article (see the "Beyond UIUC" tab of this guide).  Be sure you include complete information, especially page numbers.