InfoGuides: Media Arts and Technology (PHMS): Databases

Last Updated: Mar 20, 2024 11:08 AM

Understanding Scholarly/Academic Articles vs Practical/trade articles

Scholarly or academic articles are different from practical or popular articles.

Depending on the nature of your project you may need scholarly, practical or both types of articles.

Keep in mind some databases only have scholarly articles while others contain both scholarly and practical/trade articles. You may run into a situation where the databases identifies something as scholarly but it identifies it wrong.

Sample scholarly article.

Sample practical/trade article.

Academic/Scholarly Databases - Best Bets

General Content

Academic Search Elite This link opens in a new window
Proquest Complete This link opens in a new window

Technology, Communication, Business, and Media

Communication and Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window
Business Source Elite This link opens in a new window
SAGE Journals Online This link opens in a new window
ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window

Additional Science and Technology Databases

Gartner This link opens in a new window
Provides current reports on computing, information technology and telecommunications issues, trends, news and statistics. Access is provided by ITS. You will have to sign up the first time you access this resource.
Web of Science - All Databases This link opens in a new window
Articles in social science, science and technology disciplines. RIT's subscription includes these databases: Web of Science (1975-present); Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, Medline, and ISI Proceedings.
O'Reilly for Higher Education This link opens in a new window
O'Reilly for Higher Education provides unlimited access to over 45K titles, 30K hours of video, case studies from top companies, learning paths, expert playlists, and more -- with nearly 1K topics to explore in technology and business. Additional information may be located at: https://proquest.libguides.com/oreilly.
ACM Digital Library This link opens in a new window
Articles from technical journals, trade magazines, and conference proceedings in computer science and related disciplines from the Association for Computing Machinery.

Business and Marketing Databases

See the Market & Industry Research tab on this guide!