Module 1: Library Research Materials for PhDs
Doctoral Research in Arts Administration
activity 1.2:
The Scholarly Publishing Environment
Instructions: This activity invites you to reflect on your personal understanding of the current scholarly publishing environment. You will answer a group of questions in order to start thinking about who produces the materials that scholars use in doctoral-level research, and how these materials are presented to and accessed by researchers in libraries. As you work through the questionnaire, you will also get some introductory practice using library resources offered at UK Libraries.
First, “Make a copy” of this Google Doc to save it to your own Google Drive. Then, proceed to complete the questionnaire. To hand it in, share your completed version with kmhink0@g.uky.edu and submit through Canvas.
Questions to consider:
- List a periodical you’ve cited in one of your research papers (the name of the scholarly journal or magazine itself, not the title of the specific article you quoted).
- If someone were curious about that periodical publication and wanted to see what other articles they publish, where could they get access to that periodical? JSTOR? Through a UK Libraries subscription? Is it freely available online? Which issues would they have access to? (Could they see every issue ever published? Or only certain years? Where could they go for more?)
- Now imagine someone doesn’t want to browse through every single issue of that journal to find articles about a topic they’re interested in. Is there a database that indexes this title? Hopefully yes!
Here are some of the databases UK Libraries subscribes to that are useful for arts administration:
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- Art Index
- Business Search Complete
- Academic Source Complete
Do any of these cover your title? Or, do you know of another database/index that does? List it here:
- If you don’t yet know of a database that covers your periodical, look up your periodical’s title in Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory to find out where it is abstracted and/or indexed. List the place(s) where your periodical is abstracted or indexed here:
- Does UK Libraries provide access to any of those databases? Look up their names in the UK Libraries database list to find out.
- Finally, poke around in the help section or google for the sales/marketing site for this database. See if you can find out when this database came into existence and how it originally began, and how many other periodicals titles (in addition to the one you cited) this database indexes.
