INTL 360U Bollywood: Communicating Contemporary South Asia through Cinema: Finding Articles
Databases
Once you have a specific topic, it is time to move on to articles. The PSU Library has thousands of individual journal subscriptions that contain millions of academic articles. The best way search this massive collection is through our collection of Databases.
There are two types of Database you'll encounter during this project. The first is the subject-specific database, which are designed for researchers in a specific field. The second is are general databases that search across multiple disciplines at once. Each has strengths and weakness. A subject database - about film studies, for example - will include excellent articles about films, but are limited to that topic alone. General databases, like PRIMO, are excellent for interdisciplinary topics, but their broad scope makes it harder to limit search results to a manageable number.
For a detailed guide on using AND/OR/NOT commands in our databases, see the Search Techniques guide.
Subject Databases Include:
- Bibliography of Asian StudiesProvides access to Asian-related humanities and social science research.
- Film and Television Literature IndexProvides indexing of publications related to film and television studies.
- Historical AbstractsFind citations to academic articles on world history (except the U.S. and Canada), from the 15th century to the present.
- FIAF: International Index to Film PeriodicalsProvides indexing to periodical literature about film and cinema.
Multidisciplinary Databases:
- Academic Search PremierProvides selected full text, scholarly, and peer reviewed articles in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
- JSTORContains full text articles from major research journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Coverage of most journals starts from the beginning of a journal's publication and typically excludes the most recent three to five years.
- ProjectMuseIndexes citations for books and articles as wells as full text articles and ebooks from scholarly presses.
Finding Articles in PRIMO (PSU Catalog)
In addition to the databases listed above, you can also use the library's catalog, "PRIMO," to search for articles.
The search mechanisms used in PRIMO apply to the other databases as well.
1) Begin on the PRIMO start page by typing out your topic. In this case, I'm trying Bollywood AND poverty.
2) To narrow the search, I limit to "Peer Reviewed Journals."
3) I notice the publication date range of our articles is 1980 to 2019. To further limit our results, let's focus our publication range.
4) Limiting the publication range to the last 20 years, we are down to just over 1,000 articles. Still far too many to skim.
5) Going to the "Topic" section of the page, there is a list of subjects and themes that appear within our search results. "Bollywood" is listed as a special subject. Our current results include any article mentioning Bollywood. This option will limit our search specifically to articles about Bollywood.
6) Having limited to "Bollywood" as a subject, we are down to a manageable 40 articles.
