Library Guides: ARTH 335 / AFR 335: African Art: Scholarly Search Engines

Arts & Architecture Librarian

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Contact:

W320 Pattee Library

814-865-6778

Subjects: Architecture, Art (Contemporary), Art and Architectural History, Art Education, Arts, Campus: University Park, Graphic Design, Landscape Architecture

Introduction

This list of resources can help you select good readings for your research paper - when you need to look beyond the assigned and recommended course readings. It was put together by the librarian working with the African Art course and focuses on the visual and decorative arts and the architecture of Africa. It ends with some suggestions for other art forms of Africa (like music or dance) and pointers for related disciplines.

Scholarly Search Engines

We all start with search engines so why not the ones that focus on scholarly publications?

Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Google-style searching of books and academic journals. Use this link or make sure your browser is authenticated to get full Penn State privileges Notice that Google Books may also be searched separately.
Google 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. Once you set your institutional preferences, links to full-text, if available at Penn State, should appear.
LionSearch This link opens in a new window
Starts with Google-style searching of Penn State's library catalog plus most of the e-journals and e-books at Penn State. Allows many ways of manipulating the results. (LionSearch Tutorials are brief how-to videos.)
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Searching across the full text of an excellent collection of scholarly arts, humanities, and social science e-journals. The information about these articles like titles and abstracts are indexed in LionSearch, but if you want to search keywords in the full texts, you need to use JSTOR separately.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization that provides a trusted archive of important scholarly journals and a selection of scholarly books. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. While indexing for JSTOR articles is covered in LionSearch, the full text of the articles is not searched in LionSearch. Search JSTOR itself to ensure detailed coverage of full texts.