Library Guides: Dance: Find Articles

Databases for Dance Research

These databases will be useful to find scholarly articles about dance and dance-related topics:

JSTOR (including ARTSTOR) This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text access to a broad range of resources about the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, including primary sources, images, articles, and books. Does not contain the most recent journal articles.
Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Ultimate offers access to an unprecedented collection of resources including journals, magazines, reports, books, and videos. Many are peer-reviewed and full-text. Subjects range from astronomy to zoology.
Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive database of humanities content, providing full text of hundreds of journals, books & other published sources from arount the world. This database includes data from American Humanities Index & Humanities International Index.
Sports Medicine and Education Index This link opens in a new window
Over 300 sources are currently indexed, though not all are comprehensive. Over 250,000 records can be searched, with approximately 1,000 added every month. An online thesaurus is available. Enhancements include abstracts on health education and physical therapy; and, the addition of e-mail addresses, expanded publisher and author information, and other data to facilitate access to the full text.

Using Google Scholar for Dance Research

Google Scholar is essentially a searchable index of scholarly works. The set of information that it searches (the "Academic Internet") is not contextualized according to topics or subjects but basically looks through everything.

This means that you, the researcher, need to provide the context for your search! A good way to do that is to be generous with choosing key words and developing your search terms. Use as many as you need in order to get a set of results that appeals to your topic.

Some pro tips when using Google Scholar:

If the author's name is highlighted, you can click the link for more information, including other articles they wrote and what topics are their expertise.
If you click "cited by" under the citation result, you will get a new list of articles that cite it. This is helpful so that you can see how other authors have utilized an article you might also use.
Remember to use caution when using a platform like this, because it does have some limitations that can effect you as the researcher. One important thing to be mindful of is that not all sources have been verified for accuracy by Scholar, so be sure you are scrutinizing the information you use and where it came from.