About Scholarly Articles and Reading Tips
Key Characteristics of a Scholarly Article
- Author(s): scholars/researchers with credentials (e.g. PhD) and/or affiliations (e.g. university professor or similar knowledge-based organizations.)
- (the intended) Audience: for their academic peers in the discipline/field.
- Purpose: to further our understanding about a topic with original research, usually focusing in a narrow area of the subject (rather than to merely persuade, entertain, inform, or report.)
- Peer-reviewed scholarly articles are vetted and improved by experts in the field before publication.
- Language: scholarly language with discipline specific vocabulary.
- Structure: Relatively lengthy (at least 5 pages of text) with many citations and references to published research (footnotes and/or bibliography).
Reading Tips
A systematic approach in your reading helps you consider the article critically. A good critique is really more about your own confidence as a reader than about possession of specific knowledge.
How to Read Journal Articles Like a Professor by Michael J. Nelson.
Videos
Videos, either streaming or on DVDs can be found in JumboSearch, the Tufts libraries catalog. You can also search, for streaming video, platforms such as Kanopy 
and Swank as well as some public web sites.
- Academic Video Online
- Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford
- BroadwayHD
- Dance in Video
- Digital Theatre Plus (British Theatre)
- Kanopy
- Filmmakers Library Online (Award-winning documentaries)
- Opera in video
- PBS Video Collection
- Theatre in Video
**Search Worldwide Libraries for your production on DVD and request it.
Evaluating Information & Citing Sources
We cite sources to
- Avoid plagiarism
- Give credit to the source of an idea
- Lend credibility to our arguments
Using JumboSearch for Books and Articles on a Theatre Company
I. JumboSearch (Tufts Libraries Portal)
A. Use quotation marks in your search for a theatre company:
B. Use "filters" to refine the initial search results:
II. Subject-Specific Database for Articles
A. Performing Arts Periodicals Database
B.In EBSCOhost databases, you can search across the following databases, among others:
- Academic Search Premier
- America: History & Life
- Communication & Mass Media Complete
- Film & Television Literature Index
- Historical Abstracts (World history and culture)
- LGBTQ+ Source
- MLA International Bibliography (Literary studies)
- Women's Studies International
III. Newspapers
- Access World News (rich U.S. regional news)
- Factiva (more international coverage)
- More
Our most frequently requested newspapers:
- New York Times. | New York Times: Theatre Arts
- Boston Globe
- The Washington Post: Direct Publisher Access (Current | digital reproduction)
- The Washington Post on Factiva (Current | plain text)
