Resources for MFA Students in Art

Introduce yourself and your students to pertinent sources for scholarship, teaching, and artistic inspiration.

Specialized Databases

Circulation of Journals in the Fine Arts Library

Graduate students can check out most bound journals. Unbound issues must be used in the library.

Introduction to Journal Articles

Although books are the dominant form of scholarship in the humanities, articles are valuable, especially those appearing in scholarly journals.

Some assignments require one to limit one's search to scholarly or peer-reviewed articles. "Peer-reviewed," "scholarly," "academic,"and "refereed" are often used interchangeably to describe manuscripts that underwent expert review before publication.

Some databases allow one you to limit your search to scholarly journals.

How Do I Get This Citation?

If you discover pertinent citations to journal articles in your online searches, use Find it!, OneSearch, or Fetch Item to track down your resources.

If we don't own or subscribe to the material online, you can obtain rapidly many articles and chapters via the Libraries' ILL software, ILLiad.

Note on Controlled Vocabulary

Most searchers rely exclusively on keywords to retrieve records in databases. In many cases using keywords works well. If you wish to retrieve more precise results, try searching by the specialized terms of the database, also known as "controlled vocabulary," and often referred to as "descriptors." The order in which you enter your terms can matter as well. For example, often you can best search by author by typing the last name before the first name.