Music: Journal Articles

WESTERN ART MUSIC

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature * is a great tool to find scholarly journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, conference proceedings, reviews, and more primarily related to musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. Almost 1.4 million records from over 10,000 journal titles since the early 20th century are included in this standard database. Coverage is very international.

Music Index * features digitized content from 1970 to the present, the Music Index contains cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts of articles about music, musicians and the music industry for more than 480 periodicals with selective coverage for more than 200 additional periodicals. Includes journal articles, news articles, reviews, and obituaries.

Bibliographie des Musikschrifttums is a freely available index sponsored by the Institut fur Musikforschung in Germany. It covers many items already found in RILM, but it does have unique material that is from smaller European publications and also is much more comprehensive during the 1950-1966 period of time.

Canadian Music Periodical Index includes over 37,000 entries on articles dating from the late-19th century to the present day. Canadian music journals, newsletters and magazines are represented here, almost 200 of which are currently active and continue to be indexed. The CMPI database focuses on articles and news items touching on various aspects of music in Canada. 

POPULAR MUSIC

Music Periodicals Database (used to be International Index to Music Periodicals Full Text (IIMP)) * is generally best for researching popular music, music performance, and music education, but still includes a significant number of items related to musicology and music theory. The bulk of the records are from the past 20 years, but it does provide partial coverage all the back to 1874. Particularly strong for locating music reviews.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive * covers the core music, film, broadcasting, and theater magazines from the US and UK. Materials date from 1880-2000.

ELECTRONIC MUSIC

Contemporary Music Collection * is a small group of trade journals focused on jazz music and music technology. The eight titles found here are: Computer Music; Future Music; JazzTimes; Jazzwise Magazine; MusicTech; Music Week; Songlines; and Wire.

ElectroAcoustic Research Site (EARS) attempts to index the literature dealing with electronic music, sound art, etc. It stopped actively indexing around 2007, so it doesn't have the most recent writings, but it's a great place to search for information that might be especially important to the ICIT department.

These databases don't solely focus on music, but they do contain lots of great information that could be helpful to you depending on your topics.

JSTOR * is a multidisciplinary database that has particularly strong music coverage. Note, it generally doesn't provide the 2-4 most recent years of a journal.

International Index to the Performing Arts (IIPA) * generally focuses on drama, dance, and film research. This is a good resource to use if you are looking for music as it relates to any of these topics.

Project Muse * contains both journals and books. Music highlights include Early Music, Perspectives of New Music, American Music, and Black Music Research Journal.

SCOPUS * is an incredibly large science-focused index. It's a great resource for music topics that intersect with technology.

ERIC * is focused on education. There is a relatively large selection of music education research found here.

PsycINFO * is a psychology database. Use this if you are looking for the psychology of music or music therapy topics.

CINAHL Complete * provides medical information aimed at the nursing community. This is a good database to find information about performing arts medicine.

Academic Search Complete * is a very large multidisciplinary database. You can normally locate at least one item on your topic due to the sheer breadth of their coverage.

When you're in UC Library Search, you can request items that we don't locally own or that are currently checked out using the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) process. You will need to login to your library account (this uses your UCINet ID and password) to initiate this request. Full information is available here: https://www.lib.uci.edu/interlibrary-loan

Want to stay on top of all of the newest literature in the Music field? Create a free Browzine account and accomplish it in a snap! It easily allows you to browse journals available through UCI Libraries by subject, put them on your own personal bookshelves, and also be notified when new issues come out. Some of the journals available through this resource are below: