LibGuides: Theatre: Databases

Recommended databases

Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Contains full text articles from over 5,800 journals, covering many subjects, including anthropology, politics, political science, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social work. Coverage includes 450 magazines for news, current awareness and examples of professional practice.
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Performing Arts Periodicals Database (IIPA) This link opens in a new window
Performing Arts Periodicals Database (previous title: International Index to Performing Arts or IIPA) is a bibliographical resource offering access to international periodicals on the ProQuest platform (this has the option to search other databases too). It includes the full text for more than 160 of the 395 indexed journals from around the world from 1864 to date. It currently includes half a million records, the majority from the most recent years of each journal.
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Digital Theatre+ This link opens in a new window
Digital Theatre+ collaborates with theatre companies, industry associations, practitioners and scholars to provide access to a growing collection of full-length theatre productions and educational resources. The database contains recordings of hundreds of live captured performances across theatre, ballet, opera and classical music, including interviews with actors, directors, and backstage crew providing an insight into the workings of a theatre and what it takes to stage a play. It also features study guides accompanying curricula mapped plays, written by leading academics to help students get to grip with dramatic texts as well as relationship maps, plot summaries, theme and context analysis, glossaries and more.
Drama Online This link opens in a new window
Drama Online provides access to thousands of full-text plays by both new writers as well as established names in playwriting history. Search by playwright, genre or time period. Additional tools include ‘Character Grids’ showing which characters appear in what scenes and which lines they speak. This newly launched site contains primary and secondary content. The collection features the pre-eminent theatre lists of Methuen Drama, the Arden Shakespeare and Faber and Faber as well as production photos from the Victoria and Albert Museum and will be continually updated.
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Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Project MUSE Humanities Collection provides full-text online access to 164 humanities, arts, and social science journals from 60 scholarly publishers as well as links to Project MUSE content from databases such as America: History and life, Historical abstracts and JSTOR.
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Cambridge Core This link opens in a new window
Cambridge Core provides full text access for over two hundred journals published by Cambridge University Press in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Also available: access to Cambridge Journals Digital Archive (bought by JISC Collections) comprising 171 journals.
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EEBO: Early English Books Online This link opens in a new window
EEBO contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.
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JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Archive collections of full text electronic journals from 1880 onwards, always from volume 1, issue 1, and including previous and related titles. The most recently published issues (past 3-5 years) are not available in these collections (unless we hold a current subscription too). The Library subscribes only to the Arts & Sciences I to IX, inclusive, and the Health & General Sciences collections, as well as 19th Century British Pamphlets, a collection, created by RLUK (Research Libraries UK) and the Ireland collection (research materials relating to Ireland, spanning the 18th century to present, provided under the JISC Digitisation Programme). If you have any problem connecting to JSTOR off campus, please use the alternative link below.

Ithaka also continue to provide access to a number of freely available and open access resources which you may now search on Artstor and JSTOR. Even more content is available when you register to read – millions of articles from nearly 2,000 journals.
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Literature Online This link opens in a new window
Provides over 4200 authoritative profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics. Lists more than 20,000 works by date, country and genre.
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Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new window
Naxos Music Library is a listening service of over 140,000 classical tracks. You must use headphones when listening on Library PCs - please ask at the Help Desk if you need to borrow a pair.
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Shakespeare This link opens in a new window
An international database of Shakespeare on film, television and radio hosted by the British Universities Film & Video Council. It holds over 6,500 records dating from the 1890s to the present day.
Taylor & Francis Journals This link opens in a new window
Access to the full text articles of over 2,000 journals published by Taylor & Francis. Please note: a large selection of ebook titles are accessible on other platforms - please use Library Search to search for them (if you do not find the title you require use the Inter Library Loans service or contact your Subject Liaison Librarian for advice).
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Twentieth-Century Drama This link opens in a new window
Bringing together an unparalleled collection of the most important works from the last century from the English-speaking world, Twentieth-Century Drama features plays from noted playwrights as well as lesser known dramatists. The collection includes works by over 300 writers including Amiri Baraka, Noël Coward, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Brian Friel, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, John Osborne, Sean O’Casey, Harold Pinter, Bernard Shaw, Neil Simon, Gertrude Stein, Tom Stoppard, Derek Walcott, August Wilson and Elizabeth Wong.
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Learning on Screen This link opens in a new window
Learning on Screen is a charity whose aim is to make moving image and sound as important in education and research as the written word. This link provides information about their services, including BoB (Box of Broadcasts). The University subscribes to Box of Broadcasts (BoB), a service which works alongside our ERA Licence and allows staff and students to record and access broadcasts, even after they have aired, under the licence terms. Search for Brunel as your home institution. You may need to register and confirm your Brunel email address when you first access the new site. For service issues see the current service status webpage.
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Music Periodicals Database (IIMP) This link opens in a new window
This database provides indexing and abstracts for several hundred international music periodicals from over 20 countries, plus full text for more than 140 of the indexed journals. The database currently includes over 1.3 million records, the majority from the most recent ten years of publication. Some complete journal runs are included, with indexing back to 1874. Covers the full spectrum of subjects and all aspects of music, including music education, performance, ethnomusicology, musical theatre, theory, popular music forms and composition.
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APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window
A specialist psychology literature and related topics database, APA PsycInfo contains abstracts of articles from over 2,400 journals, dissertations and books. Popular literature is excluded. This abstract only database is updated twice weekly. Abstract only means you will not always find the full text of an article within the database. However, you can use Article Linker in the article record to check for full text online sources in other Brunel databases.
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Scopus This link opens in a new window
Scopus is the largest ever bibliographic database and indexes over 20,000 titles from science, technology, medicine and the social sciences. This abstract only database is updated daily so it is excellent for identifying the emerging research. Use Article Linker (AL - link to full text) to check for full text online sources.
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Web of Science This link opens in a new window
A database with over 92 million records of journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters dating fro 1900 to present. It includes several indexing databases in one covering: Social sciences, Arts & Humanities, and Physical Sciences. An extremely good database to use if you aren't sure where to start.
This abstract only database is updated daily. Use Article Linker (AL) to access full-text of articles etc. (where subscriptions or Open Access allow).
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OED: Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new window
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is an etymological dictionary which is widely acknowledged as the most comprehensive record of the English language, tracing the evolution and use of more than 600,000 words through 3 million quotations. OED Online gives access to latest text of the full Oxford English Dictionary, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED and enable users new ways to explore the English language: Search for new words by year, decade, or any date range. Set language in context: search by place, language type, and date to discover the impact of world events. OED Online is revised and updated at regular intervals and covers British, American, and other varieties of English, and all types of use, from formal to slang.

OUP offers another English dictionary on its Oxford Living Dictionaries platform but please note it has fewer definitions.
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Oxford Reference Online This link opens in a new window
Full text of over 200 dictionaries and reference works published by Oxford University Press, spanning 25 different subject areas, bringing together 2 million digitized entries across Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias. Please note that the text of the full and definitive Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is not available via Oxford Reference Online. See its separate entry to access the latest edition of OED.
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British Periodicals This link opens in a new window
British Periodicals traces the changing attitudes and assumptions of British writers over a period of 250 years. It consists of 460 historical periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s. Topics covered include news and reviews on literature, philosophy, history, science, the social sciences, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture. Hosted on the ProQuest integrated platform, other databases .
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Ebook Central This link opens in a new window
ProQuest Ebook Central provides access to over 18,000 authoritative ebooks covering a wide range of subjects. They can be read online and, where permitted, a section of the ebook may be downloaded. Many of them are titles that have been included on reading lists. You can search using keywords, titles or authors.
Ebook Central is designed for patrons with accessibility needs. For more information see: https://proquest.libguides.com/ebookcentral/home and https://proquest.libguides.com/ebookcentral/home.
e-Duke Books This link opens in a new window
Access to more than 2,000 scholarly frontlist e-books published by Duke University Press in the humanities and social sciences. Not all ebook content is available, but it is possible to filter by 'Available' titles to find the full-text of books and chapters.
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JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Archive collections of full text electronic journals from 1880 onwards, always from volume 1, issue 1, and including previous and related titles. The most recently published issues (past 3-5 years) are not available in these collections (unless we hold a current subscription too). The Library subscribes only to the Arts & Sciences I to IX, inclusive, and the Health & General Sciences collections, as well as 19th Century British Pamphlets, a collection, created by RLUK (Research Libraries UK) and the Ireland collection (research materials relating to Ireland, spanning the 18th century to present, provided under the JISC Digitisation Programme). If you have any problem connecting to JSTOR off campus, please use the alternative link below.

Ithaka also continue to provide access to a number of freely available and open access resources which you may now search on Artstor and JSTOR. Even more content is available when you register to read – millions of articles from nearly 2,000 journals.
Alternative link (if main link doesn't work)
Oxford Academic Journals This link opens in a new window
The Oxford Academic journals collection includes some of the world's most highly cited and prestigious Oxford University Press journals, in a broad range of subject disciplines.
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Periodicals Archive Online This link opens in a new window
Online access to over 288,000 articles from a subset of 80 full text journal backfiles published between 1891 and 2000. This collection was Purchased by JISC Collections and is available free of charge to UK Higher Education institutions.
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Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
Project MUSE Humanities Collection provides full-text online access to 164 humanities, arts, and social science journals from 60 scholarly publishers as well as links to Project MUSE content from databases such as America: History and life, Historical abstracts and JSTOR.
Alternative link (if main link doesn't work)
APA PsycArticles This link opens in a new window
APA PsycArticles is a database of full-text articles from just over 120 journals published by the American Psychological Association, the Canadian Psychological Association, Hogrefe Publishing Group and APA's Educational Publishing Foundation.
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Database search tips

Split your topic into keywords: To find better and fewer results, think about your keywords. Make sure they accurately describe what you are looking for, and add more keywords to make your search more specific.

Think of alternative keywords: For example, 'young' could also be referred to as 'youth' or 'adolescent'. Or, think of the bigger picture. For example, instead of searching for 'boys' or 'girls', try searching for 'gender'.

Search for phrases in "double quotation marks": For example, "special educational needs". This will search for the phrase as a whole, instead of the individual words.

Select a data range: For example, you may only want literature published since 2010. Most databases have the option to select dates.

For more help see our Finding resources guide, or contact your Librarian.

Finding resources guide