Guides: Television Studies: Databases

Entertainment Sources

Film Literature Index (FLI)
Contains approximately 700,000 citations to articles, film reviews and book reviews on film, tv, and video published between 1976-2001. Last updated 2005.

Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive
Primary sources for studying the history of the film and entertainment industries, from the era of vaudeville and silent movies through to 2000. The core US and UK trade magazines are included such as Variety, Billboard, Broadcasting, and The Stage.
The Vogue Archive
Contains the entire run of Vogue magazine (US edition), from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. A unique record of American and international fashion, culture and society from the dawn of the modern era to the present day.

Finding Journal Articles

There are many places to look for journal articles on television. In most cases you will want to search more than one or two databases. Television is a popular entertainment form as well as an huge industry which means it topical in general newspapers, popular magazines and business/trade journals as well as academic journals and dissertations. There are databases that exclusively index entertainment industry materials; other humanities and social science databases (such as MLA and and Web of Science) include scholarly articles on televsion. Likewise, televsion has been of central interest to Communication scholars since the field began so be sure to check the Communication resources. To save time and get the most from your searching "dollar" search multiple files at once which can be done on the EBSCO and Proquest platforms.

General Multidisciplinary Sources

EBSCO MegaFILE
General, multidisciplinary periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals.
MLA International Bibliography
Covers all the humanities in addition to literature, languages and linguistics.
JSTOR
JSTOR specializes in making available the back issues of journals in a wide variety of humanities and social science disciplines. Issues are available both as images and as text, making searching possible both within each title and across the whole database.
Project Muse
Project Muse provides full text access to articles from over 300 scholarly journals in the humanities, arts, social sciences and sciences. Coverage begins in 1995 or more recently and in most cases continues to the present. Issues are available both as images and as text; searching is possible both within each title and across the whole database.
Readers' Guide Retrospective
Provides comprehensive indexing of the popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States. Covers 1900-1982.
Web of Science
Indexes journals in the arts and humanities (as well as the sciences and social sciences). Known for cited reference searching.
Proquest Dissertations and Theses Fulltext (formerly Dissertation Abstracts)
Indexing (since 1861) and abstracting (since 1980) for doctoral-level dissertations completed at North American universities. Page images or fulltext of all available dissertations - including Penn dissertations - from 1997 to present, with some earlier dissertations. Dissertations from selected European universities are also listed. Selected master's theses are included since 1988.

Communication Sources

Communication Source
Largest file for communication and media studies related material; offers cover-to-cover (“core”) indexing and abstracts for more than 570 journals, and selected (“priority”) coverage of nearly 200 more, for a combined coverage of more than 770 titles.
Communication Abstracts
Excellent scholarly indexing and abstracting resource for the field, largely full-text. Topics include advertising, communication theory, mass communication, public communication, journalism and media studies, interpersonal communication, cultural studies, and new communication technologies.

Newspapers

Nexis Uni (NYT & much more)
Access to full-text national and international newspapers , including the New York Times, and the Times of London business and accounting information, biographical data, and some selected legal materials. News sources also include magazines, broadcast transcripts, and wire services.
Newsbank Access World News
Searchable fulltext of international and U.S. national, regional, and local newspapers.
Los Angeles Times (1881-1985), ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Full-text of LA Times from 1881-1986.
New York Times (1851-2019), ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Full-text of the New York Times. News, editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, historical photos, stock photos, and advertisements are all searchable and available for viewing and printing. Through the ProQuest interface, a searchable ASCII text underlies each article and page image in ProQuest Historical Newspapers (although the ASCII text is not available for printing or emailing). Users can search by keyword and Boolean operators as well as employ more advanced searching techniques. The results list generated by a search includes detailed bibliographic information for the articles retrieved including article title, publication, issue date, author, page, etc. Articles are emailed in pdf format.