Identify five scholarly sources providing context about your topic and your objects

Lion Devouring a Horse, 1600/20. Gallery 205. 1964.157

Guidelines for Project Bibliography

A good selection of scholarly sources will provide a solid foundation for your final project. It will inform you of the most recent research on your topic and afford you a glimpse into relevant scholarly debates.

Step 1: Conduct preliminary research

Starting from basic observations about your objects and their metadata, research the objects further. Enter key terms into relevant digital databases. Do the same with key terms and concepts from your topic description.

The best databases for general humanities research include JSTOR, Proquest, and Academic Search Complete. Although it has not been updated since 2007, the Bibliography of the History of Art is still the best search engine for art-history-specific sources.

Google Books and Wikipedia may prove useful at an early stage of research (e.g., “When did Vasari live?”), but they are not great vehicles for scholarly research.

Step 2: Identify five scholarly sources providing context about your topic and your objects

Identify at least five scholarly sources of relevance to your topic and your objects’ context(s).

First, these sources cannot be encyclopedia entries, news journalism, or blog posts. For example, essays on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline are encyclopedic—perhaps useful in the beginning, but ultimately unacceptable for this assignment.

Second, your sources must all fall into the following categories:

-(at least 1) peer-reviewed articles in academic journals**
-(at least 1) books published by academic/university presses**
-(at least 1) museum or exhibition catalogs**/***

List your five sources, formatting them according to the Chicago Manual of Style

(see https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/chicago_manual_of_style_17th_edition.html).

**The staff of SAIC’s Flaxman Library have put together a webpage explaining what “peer-reviewed articles in academic journals,” “books published by academic/university presses,” and “museum or exhibition catalogs” are:

https://libraryguides.saic.edu/evaluating/ARTHI1001. Please make use of this great resource.

***One excellent source of free digitized museum catalogs is the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/titles-with-full-text-online.

N.B. If you download a source, check it out from the library, or order it via I-Share/Interlibrary Loan, and it turns out not to be very helpful, you should find another source. It is therefore important that you begin acquiring sources early.

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