ARTICLES + JOURNALS
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What's in a database, anyway?
Need to find scholarly, peer-reviewed articles related to the artwork you're writing about? Searching library databases is a great place to start! Even beyond JSTOR, UCI Libraries has specialist art databases that provide access to even more art journals and magazines. But it is important to understand that you'll also find other types of resources in your search results, such as:
1: Scholarly Articles: Academic articles are written by people who are experts in their field. These sources are often referred to as "peer reviewed," which means that other scholars in the author's field critically assess a draft of the article before it is published. To see a preliminary list of academic art journals that exist, visit this page here, or try browsing a library journal tool called BrowZine!
2: Artist interviews: The goal of an artist interview is to provide readers with a first hand account (primary source) information about the artist, their work, their viewpoints, and other aspects in relation to their artistic practice. Watch an example here from LACMA.
4: Book Reviews: Scholarly book reviews are written for scholars by scholars. These reviews place the book within the scholarly discourse, compare the book to other works in the field, and analyze the author's methodology, interpretations, and conclusions. See an example of an academic book review here.
6. Conference Proceedings: In academia, a conference proceeding is a collection of academic papers published in the context of an academic conference or workshop. Conference proceedings typically contain the contributions made by researchers at the conference.
3. Exhibition Reviews: Exhibition reviews are an important way of creating active critical discussion, and also of building tomorrow’s art history. Art exhibition reviews serve two purposes: (1) to tell readers who haven’t seen the exhibition a little about it so they can consider going, and (2) to document and critique the activities of a city’s art world. Exhibition reviews are excellent sources for researching emerging artists who are not yet represented in scholarly literature as well as established artists in order to gain insight into the reception of their work over time. See an example here.
5: Dissertations: The term thesis is used to describe work at any level, undergraduate to doctoral. Dissertation is used to describe doctoral-level work, and you'll often see that Ph.D. dissertations are indexed in databases. It is essentially a very long essay on a particular subject. See an example of a UCI dissertation in Visual Studies here.
Evaluating Academic Articles
RESEARCH TIP: Read about the journal you're citing to better understand how the art historical discourse has evolved over time.
Example: N paradoxa is a feminist art journal (1970s), Artforum began in the 1960s, and Third Text (art in a global context) began in the late 80s.
1: The Author credentials, abstract, a volume/issue and year:
2: The source that the article is being published in:
3. A list of scholarly references at the end:
Databases: Visual Arts
An excellent starting point for all visual arts research, this database covers all periods and media and includes scholarship starting from the 1930s to the present.
This database covers 19th century art through to contemporary and is mainly Western in focus but does have some global art coverage. Scholarship dates back to the 1960s to the present.
The IBA covers Western art from antiquity to the present, and global art since 1945. It covers all visual arts & media and scholarship since 2007. It is the predecessor of the Bibliography of the History of Art - a freely available (via the Getty) citational database covering arts scholarship 1975-2007.
The Artforum Archive provides full-text digital access to all issues from 1962 through 2020. Artforum was founded in San Francisco in 1962 with an ethos to center the West Coast artists, given that so many prominent art magazines catered to the New York art scene.
Databases: Multidisciplinary
Freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across publishing formats & all disciplines.
You likely already know this one :) covers all disciplines, all full-text! Just keep in mind there is a 5 year embargo so articles published since 2016 aren't yet available here.
A Western-language bibliographical database for research on East, Southeast and South Asia.
This database provides full-text access to a vast amount of PhD dissertations and MA theses from the United States and globally.
Brief Database Video Tutorials:
Google Scholar: Checking Your Settings (57 seconds)
Google Scholar: Advanced Searching (1 min 38 sec)
Academic Search Complete: Search Tips (2 min 11 sec)
UC Library Search: Find Articles (2 min 26 sec)