Although the medium by which music research is done has largely changed from print to digital, the essential principles of music research are much the same as they were before the computer revolution. Comprehending these essential principles and translating them into action in a music library which is now a rich repository of both digital and traditional resources constitutes the music research we have the opportunity to do here. 

As the internet proliferates, there is a growing perception that "everything is online," and many researchers, both novice and advanced, assume that they can find whatever resources they need merely by doing a Google search. Yes, they can find resources, but are they the best or most relevant resources? Real music research is neither that simple nor that easy. 

In music and many other fields, research involves reading articles in scholarly journals or other scholarly collections. While you cannot search for articles in library online catalogs, you can use our online catalog to find out whether our library has a certain journal or other source by doing a title search for it.

Finding the best articles for your research is a complicated process in any field of knowledge. For serious music research, there is no easy one-step way to achieve it. PLEASE NOTE: not all music journals are available electronically.

The best way to begin your search for articles is to search in MUSIC-SPECIFIC electronic article databases. They both cite articles and link to full text of many articles. You can access these and other databases by doing a database search from the library home page. If you want the best, most relevant articles, not the ones that are easiest to get, you may have to come to the library to look at print journals or print books of essays.

The databases on our list are not websites that are free for all on the Internet. They are products for which our university buys subscriptions. If you are not using a campus computer, you must go in through our website to get the free access to which all UNT people are entitled. Authorized UNT users are allowed to access all of our subscription databases remotely by providing EUIDs and passwords.

If an article database does not link to full text of an article it cites, then search the source of that article (journal title, title of book of essays, etc.) in our online catalog to see if we have it. The article database does not have any information about our print holdings, so it will just say we do not have the article if they do not have full text.