MFA Visual Art Research

Searching scholar.google.com allows you to use Google's search bar (which is much more forgiving when it comes to choosing the right keywords) while still getting scholarly results.  Google doesn't pay for articles for you, like the library does, so if you find something that you want to read in full text, just follow the instructions further down on this page to see if we have access to the same article in the library.
If you want results from our databases to show up in your Google Scholar results, just follow these instructions!

If you're searching for a topic, for example black and white photographers, and you want to find reputable names your professors might recognize, try adding terms to help the search engine understand what you're looking for. contemporary black and white photography and ________________

• -pinterest (adding a minus sign to your Google search will exclude any of those results)
• gallery
• museum
• archive
• exhibition
• group exhibition
• exhibition review

Add the term filetype:pdf when searching for exhibition catalogs if you want to see if there's a PDF version you can view online.

Use "quotation marks" around phrases so the search engine doesn't search for each word individually. In Google, any word in quotation marks must be included in any results.

Researching a topic?

• Search for a broad topic, like impressionism, to get ideas for how to narrow your topic into a specific research question
• Split your research question into different search bars using Advanced Search. If your research question is "How did the Dutch tulip trade influence still life painting" you can put dutch or flemish or netherlands on one line, tulip trade on another line, and still-life or still life on the bottom line.
  

Looking for something specific?

• Paste in a book title to see if we have it
• Paste in an article title to see if we have the full text (if you don't find it that way, try searching for the journal title here)

If you've already tried searching for the article title above, and you also tried searching for the journal title here but you still can't find the full text, try searching online! Google the title of the article in quotation marks to see if it's available on the author's website, in a free eBook, or in Google Scholar, etc.

If none of that works, then you can request an InterLibrary Loan. We'll ask another library to scan the article and send it to you electronically! Available to all grad students, regardless if you're local or not. Go here to request an InterLibrary Loan.

Results from these databases show up in your @LL Search results (search bar at the top of this page), but if you want to search in just one database instead, you can choose one of these: