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MUMH 5010: Introduction to Research in Music: Article Databases

Introduction to Research in Music (various instructors)


Music-specific databases providing article citations, with many links to full text

This is the most important article database for academic research in classical music:

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) is a vast international bibliography of scholarly writings on music and related disciplines. It covers music journals and other scholarly sources such as Festschriften and conference reports. It began as a print publication in 1967, providing citations and abstracts of articles. The electronic product now has full text of over 300,000 articles. Although its former focus was historical musicology, it now includes fields such as jazz and music education.

RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals 1800-1950. Published under the auspices of the International Musicological Society, International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres, and UNESCO’s International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies. This full-text database is similar in purpose to RILM, but covers a different time period.


​RIPM Jazz Periodicals
Full text of many historically significant American jazz journals and magazines​, for example, early decades of Down Beat

Music Index
Indexes hundreds of music journals and magazines from many different countries, and provides full text of many articles. It originated as a print publication in 1949; the database covers the years from 1970 to the present. Unlike RILM, it has always included all kinds of music, so it is a good resource for research in fields such as jazz, popular music, world music, and music education. 

Searching for scholarly materials on Google

Google Scholar cites many important scholarly articles and other works, but does not always provide full text.  In such cases, use Google's information to search our subscription databases to see if we have full text.

http://scholar.google.com

Google Books provides full text of many public domain books and helpful previews of many others.  In some cases, however, it provides only citations.  If a whole book is not accessible, search the library's online catalog to see if we have the book.

http://books.google.com 

You can search the redesigned version of our online catalog, which is called Discover, from the library homepage
library.unt.edu/
by clicking the "Books & More" tab beside the search box. 
You can also search it directly from discover.library.unt.edu

Here is a link for a music-specific search page from our old catalog:
http://iii.library.unt.edu/search~S7/X

Additional Links

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