LibGuides: Music: Articles

Databases for Music Research

These are the best databases we have for research in Music. There are more options, especially for cross-disciplinary research on the Secondary Databases tab. You can see all our databases in our Databases A to Z list.

Performing Arts Database
Indexes more than 395 international periodicals plus full text for more than 160 of the indexed journals. Topics include music, dance, drama, theatre, stagecraft, musical theatre, circus performance, opera, pantomime, puppetry, magic, performance art, film, television, and more. Coverage from 1864 to present.
Oxford Music Online
More than 52,000 articles on composers, performers, conductors, instruments and notation, forms and genres, and individual works. Includes the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Oxford Companion to Music, and the Oxford Dictionary of Music.

New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musician - See Oxford Music Online above.

ProQuest
Provides access to eight bibliographic and full-text databases including the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, Dissertations & Thesis at SDSU, EconLit, Physical Education Index, ProQuest Discovery, ProQuest Dissertations and Thesis and ProQuest Research Library. Coverage includes subjects ranging from popular and scholarly literature. The databases can be search all together or individually.
Arts and Humanities Citation Index - Web of Science (ProQuest)
Multidisciplinary index to the journal literature of the arts and humanities. It fully covers over 1,600 of the world's leading arts and humanities journals. It also indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 6,000 major science and social science journals. Publication years: 1975 to present
ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) via EbscoHost
The largest education database in the world, containing over 1.6 million records. Includes journal articles, books, conference papers, reports, policy papers, and other education related-materials. Coverage from 1966 to the present. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
JSTOR
Includes more than 1,700 leading academic journals and 45,000 Ebooks in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as other materials valuable for academic work.
Project MUSE
Provides full-text/image access to articles from more than 150 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics from many of the world’s leading university presses and scholarly societies.
Business Source Premier
Provides information from business, marketing, management, accounting, finance and economics. Business Source Premier has more than 2,300 journals 1,100 peer-reviewed titles, and includes magazines, newspapers and periodicals. Also included are company profiles, industry profiles, market research reports and country reports. The database provides full text back to 1886, and searchable cited references back to 1998.
This database is provided by the South Dakota State Library and the Institute of Museum Library Services.
Current Contents Connect - Web of Science
Complete tables of contents and bibliographic information from the world’s leading scholarly journals. Use Table of Contents alerting to be notified when new issues of relevant journals are available. Content includes Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences, Social & Behavioral Sciences, Clinical Medicine, Life Sciences, Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences, Engineering, Computing & Technology, Arts & Humanities, Business Collection, Electronics & Telecommunications Collection. Coverage from 1998 to present.

These databases are divided into general databases and related subject databases.

General databases are good for doing fairly basic cross-disciplinary research.
Subject databases are good for finding research on your topic from fields other than yours.

General Databases

Internet Archive
A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more - all in the public domain.
SciELO Citation Index - Web of Science
Access to scholarly literature in sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities published in leading open access journals from Latin American, Portugal, Spain and South Africa. Coverage from 1997 to present.

Subject Databases

French 17
Provides an annual survey of research in seventeenth-century French studies, including literary history and criticism, bibliography, linguistics and language, politics, society, philosophy, science, religion and the arts. Includes summaries of articles, books, and book reviews. Online access: 1993 (number 41) to 2015 (number 63). Briggs Library has numbers 32-62 in print. (Upper Level PQ241.A11 F74)
PsycINFO
Focused on literature in psychology and related disciplines. Respected resource from the American Psychological Association (APA). Includes scholarly articles, book chapters, dissertations, book reviews, and editorials. Indexes more than 4 million records and offers extensive coverage from the 1800’s to the present. Allows users to identify document types, research methodologies, tests or assessment instruments, and grant or funding sources.
SocIndex
The database features more than 2.1 million records with subject headings from a 20,000+ term sociological thesaurus. This product also contains extensive indexing for books/monographs, conference papers, and other non-periodical content. Searchable cited references are also provided.
ARTstor
Artstor is now on JSTOR. The Artstor website was retired on August 1, 2024. This link will now redirect to Artstor on JSTOR.

Provides access to more than one million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences. Search for images by keyword, title, creator, geography, classification, collection, and date.
EconLit
Published by the American Economic Association and covers a wide range of economics-related literature. Indexes of journals, books and dissertations from 1969.
Regional Business News
Provides comprehensive full text coverage for regional business publications and incorporates coverage of more than 100 regional United States and Canadian business publications. Sources include business journals, newspapers and newswires.
This database is provided by the South Dakota State Library and the Institute of Museum Library Services.

ProQuest U.S. Major Dailies
Provides access to The New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. Full-text access from 1980 to the present.
Argus Leader via ProQuest Digitized Newspapers (Includes page images)
This resource includes the full-text of The Sioux Falls Argus Leader from 2010; The Des Moines Register from 2009. This product is not searchable by topic but the full newspapers can be accessed by date. The images are scanned into PDFs. This resource averages four days behind the current date.
Argus Leader via Proquest Historical Newspapers : South Dakota Collections (1886 - Current)
The ProQuest Historical Newspapers: South Dakota Collection provides full access to Sioux Falls Argus -Leader from 1886 - Current.
Title list includes :
Daily Argus (1886-1887)
The Daily Argus-Leader (1887-1890)
Sioux Falls Argus-Leader (1890-1891)
Daily Argus-Leader (1891-1892)
Evening Argus-Leader (1892-1897)
The Daily Argus-Leader (1897-1956)
Sioux Falls Argus-Leader (1956-1977)
USA Today (2009-)
Indigenous Newspapers in North America
Indigenous Newspapers in North America presents the publications of a range of communities, with an extensive list of periodicals produced in the United States and Canada, including Alaska, Arizona, British Columbia, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, from 1828 to 2016.

Included in the collection are national periodicals as well as local community news and student publications. The range of subjects from an Indigenous perspective, include the civil rights era and American Indian Movement (AIM), education, environmentalism, land rights and cultural representation.
American Prison Newspapers, 1800-2020: Voices from the Inside
American Prison Newspapers brings together hundreds of newspapers published within prisons by incarcerated people over the past 200 years. When complete, the collection will contain newspapers from prisons in every state, representing penal institutions of all kinds, including women-only institutions.
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
Confederate Newspapers: A Collection From Florida/Georgia/Tennessee/Virginia/Alabama
A mixture of issues and papers from Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and Alabama ranging from 1861-1865.
Nineteenth (19th) Century US Newspapers
Provides access to primary source newspaper content from the 19th century, featuring full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S. The collection encompasses the entire 19th century, with an emphasis on such topics as the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life, among other subjects.
This database is provided by the South Dakota State Library and the Institute of Museum Library Services.
Business Source Premier
Provides information from business, marketing, management, accounting, finance and economics. Business Source Premier has more than 2,300 journals 1,100 peer-reviewed titles, and includes magazines, newspapers and periodicals. Also included are company profiles, industry profiles, market research reports and country reports. The database provides full text back to 1886, and searchable cited references back to 1998.
This database is provided by the South Dakota State Library and the Institute of Museum Library Services.

Get a list of online and print journals SDSU currently does or in the past did subscribe to:

You can also search for a specific journal by title in the search below:

Free Online Journals

Music Theory Online
Refereed

Action, Criticism, and Theroy for Music Education
Refereed
British Postgraduate Musicology
Peer-Reviewed
Critical Studies in Improvisation
Peer-Reviewed
Current Research in Jazz
Peer-reviewed
Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
Peer-reviewed
Empirical Musicology Review
Ethnomusicology Review
Hellenic Journal of Music, Education, and Culture
Peer-reviewed
Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies
Peer-reviewed
Journal of Jazz Studies
Peer-reviewed
Journal of Music and Meaning
Peer-reviewed
Journal of Music History Pedagogy
Peer-reviewed
Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music
Refereed
Journal of Sonic Studies
Journal of the Society for Music in Ireland
Peer-reviewed
Min-Ad: Isreal Studies of Musicology Online
Refereed
Music & Anthropology
Peer-reviewed
Music & Politics
Peer-reviewed
Music & Arts in Action
Music Performance Research
Peer-reviewed
Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology
Reviewed by a board of editors
Sound Effects
Peer-reviewed
South Central Music Bulletin
Reviewed
Voices

Search Alerts

Search alerts allow you to save searches and have them run automatically with the results being sent to you periodically. Check who provides the database you use most often and follow the instructions below.

Ebsco database search alert instructions.

ProQuest database search alert instructions.

Web of Science (Clarivate) database search alert instructions.

If your database is not from Ebsco, ProQuest, or Web of Science, contact your subject librarian for help.

Terminology: Journal/Magazine

Are you confused about the difference between journals and magazines? No problem, here is what to look for to determine which you have.

Journals: Content is written to inform the reader.

Author(s) named and credentials given
Sources cited in the article
Bibliography at the end (often it is long)
Articles report on research or review the current state of a topic
Articles tend to be long
Illustrations are usually graphs and charts and are necessary to understand the text
Few if any advertisements in the journal

Magazines: Content is written to entertain the reader.

Author is often not named
If sources are given, they are not cited entirely
No bibliography
Articles report on events and people, if research is reported, it is not in detail
Articles are short
Illustrations are often in color and are intended to entertain
Lots of advertisements for a wide variety of products

Interlibrary Loan

Although Briggs Library has an extensive collection, you may need items that are not available at the Library. No worries! You can request those articles, books, and other materials through Interlibrary Loan.

Interlibrary Loan

Keep in mind that the process may take from a week to ten days. Start your research early!

Many of our databases have an Interlibrary Loan Request button for articles not available in that particular database. Before submitting the loan request, be sure to check our Journals List for the title of the source or periodical (i.e. New York Times).

Journals List - Find a Journal

For more information on Interlibrary Loan, see our ILL FAQ.

FAQ: Interlibrary Loan

Music: Articles