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Music 170A -- Music of the Americas: Latin America -- Dr. Donald Henriques

Finding Articles

The library's journal articles can be accessed in one of 3 ways:

1. PRINT
Print journals can typically be found bound together in book form and can be checked out. These are often referred to as "periodicals" and can be found on the 2nd floor of the library (on the same level/wing as Starbucks)

2. MICROFILM
You can find journals that are on microfilm in the library. Each reel of microfilm contains several issues of a particular journal or newspaper. You can look at and print from microfilm using machines called microfilm readers. Please ask at the reference desk.

3. ONLINE
The library subscribes to hundreds of journals online which are available through the databases. Each database provides access to different journals. Music Index, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Academic Search Premier are examples of databases of interest to music students. See the links to these databases in the Databases box on this page.

Citation Searching

You can use Citation Linker to help you find a specific article in a journal.

You can use Google Scholar to find out if other authors have cited a specific article. This can help you to find other articles that are relevant to your topic and to figure out the interconnections among various articles and research.

Simply perform your search from the Google Scholar search page and then click on the Cited by link at the bottom of each citation in your results. Be aware that the number of results you find are limited to the content that is available on the web.

For advanced citation searching, check out the article "Google Scholar: the New Generation of Citation Indexes".

Interlibrary Loan

If you search the databases and find articles that you want that the library does not have, you can request them using interlibrary loan. Usually, it will just take a few days for your articles to be sent to you via email. Click on the ILLiad link from the article citation in the database or go to the ILLiad log in page and then cut and paste the information from the citation into the required fields (enter as much information about the article as you can). First time users of ILLiad must enter their customer information before they can submit Interlibrary Loan requests. Once you have registered, you will not have to supply this information again.

Search the Databases to Find Journal Articles

Searching the databases for articles: 

  • Select Journal Articles and Databases tab
  • You can do a multi-search (multiple databases) in the search box, or you can Select "Search by Subject" and select "Music"
  • You can click on the name of a database to search it directly (recommended for advanced searching)
  • OR... you can use the Multi-Search tab to search up to 10 different databases at once. This is recommended if you are just starting to explore your topic and want to quickly see what's available.

Databases

See this list for databases recomended for researching topics in music. Remember that other databases in topics such as history, philosophy, and multicultural studies (to name a few) may also be worthwhile to explore. See Databases by Subject for a full list.

In many cases, databases include full text for the articles that they index. If there isn't a full text (PDF or HTML) link for an article, use the "Find It @ Fresno State" link to search for full text across all the library's databases. If the article is not available through the library, "Find It" will take to to a form where you can request the article from another library.

Online Dictionaries, Encyclopedias and Reference

Oxford Music Online is a gateway to Grove Music Online (which includes the full texts of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz); The Oxford Companion to Music (which offers more than 8,000 articles on composers, performers, conductors, individual works, instruments and notation, forms and genres); and The Oxford Dictionary of Music (which supplements Grove’s more extensive coverage with content geared toward undergraduates and general users).

Search Tips

Search Tips: Using Boolean Logic

You can use Boolean logic when you are searching a database for journal articles. Boolean "operators" (AND, OR and NOT) define the relationships between the terms you enter in the search bar(s).

  • AND can be used between terms to expand the search to include all terms (ex. search for the terms "travel" and "Europe")
  • OR allows for results that contain at least one of the terms you enter (ex. "college" OR "university")
  • NOT excludes terms so that you can specificy that search results not contain certain terms (USE WITH CAUTION)

The following table illustrates the operation of Boolean terms:

And Or Not
Each result contains all search terms. Each result contains at least one search term. Results do not contain the specified terms.
The search heart and lung finds items that contain both heart and lung. The search heart or lung finds items that contain either heart or items that contain lung. The search heart not lung finds items that contain heart but do not contain lung.

Other Tips:

  • Keyword Searching---search key words in the title, author, and/or subject field (use the drop down menu to change fields. Keyword is usually the default)

  • Use quotation marks to search for terms together (useful when searching a certain phrase or the title of an article) ex. "social networking"
  • Use an asterisk (*) to search for alternate word endings (ex. immigra* retrieves immigration, immigrant, immigrants, immigrated, etc...)