Music: Music 304

Use the Searching Tips and Tricks tab to help set up your search before you begin.

Checklist

• Brainstorm terms for each concept in your topic
• Determine the best way to combine terms and concepts (quotation marks, parentheses, truncation, etc.)
• Determine the types of resources you want
  • Do you want primarily books or articles?
  • If you want articles, do they need to be peer-reviewed, academic, or anything goes?
• Determine the best databases to search - see those listed below with their descriptions
• Record your searching - where you searched and exactly what you searched with the results as you go along
• Search multiple databases to get the broadest possible search result set
• Choose the articles you want to use
• Do you know about EndNote or Zotero as citation managers? Are you going to use one of them?
• Evaluate your articles!
  • Know whether they are from reliable sources (peer-reviewed or other academic journals or books from scholarly publishers)
  • Use the CRAAP test to help determine how much weight to give information from articles or books.

The Quick Search is a quick way to find lots of results of all types. It searches the library catalog for books, government documents, videos, etc. and many article databases covering all fields. This is a Google-like search and will probably result in many results.

World Cat is a collection of thousands of library catalogs as well as some article databases. You will find lots of books that we own and even more that we don't own as well as articles of many types (peer-reviewed, academic, magazine, etc.).

This source includes The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as well as the Oxford Dictionary of Music and the Oxford Companion to Music. It is a good source for definitions and encyclopedia articles.

Play the Kahoot Quiz to see how much you remember!

Abstract

The abstract is a one paragraph summary of the main points in the article.

Introduction

The introduction presents the problems the paper will be looking at and presents a case for why the problems are worth studying.

Literature Review

The literature review puts the current study into context within the scholarly conversation as a whole.

Methodology

The methodology tells the user how the study was conducted. Ideally, this section gives enough detail that a reader could replicate the study (do it over again).

Results

The results are where the author presents their findings. Statistical analyses will be presented in this section if appropriate.

Discussion

The discussion section allows the author to place the results into context and interpret his or her findings.

Conclusion

The conclusion section helps move the research forward. Where does the scholarly conversation go from here.

References

The references bring all the sources of information used in the research into a list so you can go back and do further research of your own.

Search for business related articles in academic journals (including peer-reviewed), magazines, and trade publications (like magazines but geared for professionals in a certain industry). The music industry is included in this but focusing on the business end of it.

This is a subset of the Business Search above. It focuses on smaller regional businesses and publications. It includes South Dakota Business Review but no publications specifically on the music industry. 

This databases focuses on economics from a broad perspective including business. It does include articles on the music business but often not enough to use alone. These are largely academic journal articles.

This is a broad database that includes general articles on music as well as the EconLit database above. The articles range from magazine and newspaper articles through peer-reviewed and theses and dissertations from graduate students around the world. These databases are not included in the Quick Search.