Mass Media and Film

When you search these databases for articles, you can try several strategies.

• Search for the title of a specific film.
• Search for the name of a filmmaker or actor.
• Search for a geographic region: (eg. "asia" or "united states" or "paris"), a film genre (e.g. "comedy" or "horror"), or a time period (e.g., "post-war" or "fifties" or "1940s").
• Search for concepts related to how the film is made (e.g., 'mise en scene" "lighting," "music or soundtrack or score," etc.)
• Search for concepts related to your topic.  For example, you might search for "immigrants or immigration or migrants or migration," or "women or gender," or "trauma or PTSD or war"
• Search for different combinations of everything above!

More Tips for Searching DISCOVERY (below)

• Keep your search terms simple. For example: Mise en scene, Surrealist films, Neorealism, etc. Using sentences or long phrases can result in poor results.
• Better search terms: You'll see every article is tagged with subjects describing the article. Try matching your search terms to these subject terms to get better results.
• Narrow your results: You will often receive hundreds (if not thousands) of articles in your search, focus your results to make it MUCH easier to find what you need! Here's two ways to do this...
  1. Use the left column to "Refine Results":  
     • Selecting "Available in Print + Online" limits the list to articles you can access now.
     • Publication date can limit articles to a specific time period.
     • Source type allows you to limit the search to just magazines, academic journals, books, etc.
     • Subject shows common subjects within your search.
     • Click "show more" for additional options within each category.
  2. "AND": Use the word "AND" to connect two ideas in your search such as "Iran AND Documentary films" It will limit your search to only articles that have both terms in common.
  3. You can use both of these methods together!
• Email articles: When you click an article title, you'll see "email" in the right column. This method will include the option to include an APA or MLA citation!