You are required to find critical interpretations to include in your research paper. In critical interpretations, scholars use theory to study, analyze, evaluate, or interpret a play, characters in a play, or themes in a play. In addition to finding books about your play or playwright (using PittCat), you should find some scholarly articles. Scholarly articles are written by an expert in the field and are often reviewed by other experts in the same field prior to publication. This means that they have a higher level of quality than magazine or newspaper articles. Most databases give you the option to limit the results list to include only scholarly articles, and others, like JSTOR and Project MUSE contain only scholarly articles.
Here are a few databases you can use to find scholarly articles...simply type in the name of your play or playwright to get started!
JSTOR (Journal Storage) is a digital library that provides online access to academic journals, books, and primary sources in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It is a trusted source for scholarly research and provides access to over 6,000 academic journals, more than 2 million images, and over a thousand books. The platform has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to search and access high-quality, peer-reviewed content. JSTOR also features advanced tools for research and discovery, including citation analysis and alerts for new content. It is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and researchers in the academic community.
This scholarly collection provides journal coverage for most academic areas of study, including biological sciences, economics, communications, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts and literature, medical sciences and women's studies. This is an EBSCOHost database.
This is a great, short video from RMIT University in Australia that explains what scholarly/peer-reviewed/articles and library databases are.