Film Studies: Find Articles and Web Sources

When you have a research assignment, be sure to figure out what types of article sources are required or allowed. Some professors require you to use only scholarly peer-reviewed journals while others might let you use a variety of journals.

Scholarly article: Also known as peer-reviewed, academic, or refereed, these articles are written for researchers and experts and usually share the results of a research study. Scholarly articles are written by experts in the field and are reviewed by expert peers. In many databases, you can limit your search to scholarly, peer-reviewed, or refereed journals to weed out any non-scholarly content. Scholarly article example

Professional/trade article: Written for people working in a specific field. Articles can be written by experts in the field or by staff writers. The articles are only reviewed by journal editors, so they go through a less rigorous review process. Trade article example

Popular journals: Written for a general audience rather than for professionals or scholars, and written by journalists. Examples include The New Yorker, People, and Rolling Stone. Popular article example

So, what's the difference between a film review and film criticism?

Film reviews are typically written by journalists or other non-academic folks for a general audience. You’ll usually find them in newspapers, magazines, or online, and they’re published around the time a movie hits theaters. The goal is to give people an idea of what the movie’s about — like the plot, characters, and what the director brought to the table — to help decide if it's worth seeing. A simple Google search with the name of the film and the word reviews will likely give you some results.

On the other hand, film criticism dives deeper into analyzing and interpreting a film, often looking at things like its historical context, theoretical aspects, or technical details. This kind of writing is usually done by academics and gets published in books or scholarly journals. Sometimes it’ll focus on specific elements of a film, or it might look at a director’s work or a certain genre. Critical essays can also come out long after the movie has been released. Use the databases and Google Scholar to find criticism.

*This is a photo of a night shoot from the recently deceased director, David Lynch. The film is Blue Velvet with Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan, seen here. Fun fact: Alan, the librarian who created this guide, used to own the house you see in the background.

In this video, you’ll learn how to turn something you find interesting into a researchable question for a college research project.

Google's advanced search lets you limit your search to more reliable resources, like education sites or government sites. To do this, add site:edu or site:gov to your regular Google search.

For example: 

• If you do an ordinary Google search for nutritional supplements, most of your top results will be commercial (.com) sites trying to sell you vitamins.
• If you search for nutritional supplements site:gov , the top results (except for the sponsored ads) will be sites such as the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, which are authoritative, unbiased sources that are not trying to sell you anything.
• If you search for nutritional supplements site:edu, your top results will be from universities providing research on nutritional supplements.

Learn more Google Search tips from "6 Google Tricks That Will Turn You Into an Internet Detective" in the New York Times.