COM ARTS/ASIAN 443: Indian Cinema and Beyond (Fall 2023) : Find Articles
Locating Article Databases
To learn how to locate article databases by name or subject, see the tip sheet below.
Searching Databases
Finding a Specific Article
Film Specific Databases
- Performing Arts Periodicals DatabaseThis article database covers a broad spectrum of the arts and entertainment industry, including dance, film, television, drama, theater, stagecraft, musical theater, broadcast arts, circus performance, comedy, storytelling, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic and more. It draws its current content from more than 400 scholarly and popular performing arts periodicals, and indexes a variety of documents such as biographical profiles, conference papers, obituaries, interviews, discographies, reviews and events. Over 130 of the 395 periodicals contain full-text articles. Although the majority of titles begin in 1998, an increasing number of important journals have been added retrospectively, some back to 1864. Formerly known as International Index to the Performing Arts Full Text (IIPA). (Updated quarterly)
- Entertainment Industry Magazine ArchiveAccess to periodicals from the film and and entertainment industries from the United States and United Kingdom from the late 1800's through 2000.
South Asian Specific Film Journals
This is a list of some of the journals we have pertaining specifically to South Asian Film. This list in non-exhaustive and represents journals that we have runs of more than a year/few issues of.
- BioScope : South Asian screen studiesOnline Resource
- Indian cinema : official catalogueOnline Resource
- Journal of the moving imageOnline Resource
- Studies in South Asian film & mediaOnline Resource
Multi-Subject Databases with Good Representation of Film
- JSTORJSTOR is a full-text journal database which provides access to more than 1,200 titles in the fields of African-American studies, anthropology, architecture, Asian studies, biological sciences, botany, ecology, economics, education, film, finance, folklore, history, language, literature, mathematics, middle east studies, music, philosophy, political science, population/demography, religion, sociology, and statistics. Coverage begins with volume one of each title and continues to within 3 to 5 years of the most current issue, depending on the title.
- ProquestProQuest’s indexing databases cover multiple disciplines and provide indexing of dissertations and theses, historical newspapers; government documents and scholarly journals. Selected Proquest databases that have content relevant to Russian and Soviet history and culture are: Humanities Index, Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, GenderWatch, Film Index International, International Index to Performing Arts (IIPA), Periodical Index Online, Periodicals Archive Online, Sociological Abstracts, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, Historical Newspapers (NYT, etc)
- Project MuseProvides full text access to more than 300 scholarly journals published by several university presses in the humanities and social sciences
- MLA International BibliographyCoverage from 1926 to the present. Literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore from over 4,000 journals and series published worldwide
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
- Academic Search PremierAcademic Search Premier is a general academic index with almost 3,000 magazines and journals from every academic discipline and provides the full-text of more than 1,200.
Search Terms for Articles on Film
There are certain searches that will produce more results than others:
Make sure that you are including a place, such as:
- Asia, South Asia, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Lahore, etc.
Or a language, such as:
- Hindi, Punjabi, Odiya, Tamil, etc.
What are you interested within Film Studies:
- Motion Pictures, Mass Media, Motion Picture Industry, etc.
Types of film
- Drama, Action, Horror, Romance
What is an underlying theme?
- Gay, Lesbian, Abuse, Caste, Education, Child/Children, Dyslexia, Disability, Marriage, Arranged Marriage, etc.
Who is the director, the star, etc?
- Satyajit Ray, Deepa Mehta, Aamir Khan, Shabana Azmi, etc.
Just like with books, when you are searching for articles, you may need to put in the library romanization of the title, especially for older films and films based on or from books, e.g., Aparājita. It is recommended that you search using both spellings, e.g., Pather panchali AND Pathera pān̐cālī. If you are unable to make diacritics properly, just use the plain romanized forms, e.g., Pathera pancali.
Search Tips
- Use AND to combine different words to find all those words, in any order.
- Film AND history
- Use OR to combine similar words or synonyms or variations
- Bollywood OR Hindi Cinema
- Pather panchali OR Pathera Pancali
- Use quotation marks ( " ") to search words as a phrase
- "Tare Zameen Par"
- Use an asterisk ( * ) to find varied endings of words and singular and plural forms.
- film* to find film, films, filming, etc.
- Look at Subjects to find additional keywords and use them to find relevant and specific results.
- Look for an option to limit to Scholarly Journals on the left side of search results in most databases