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Subjects: General Reference
Reference Resources
The resources in this section are selected to help you contextualize your research question and orient you to current and previous scholarship.
Timelines
Timelines situate your research historically, geographically, and disciplinarily and allow you to quickly identify the kinds of general topic overviews you should consult.
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Oxford Art Online: Timelines of World Art--AsiaThe timelines feature brief summaries of important events in the visual arts; many of the summaries are accompanied by an image, and all link to articles in Grove Art Online for further reading.
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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (The Met)Presents a thematic, chronological, and geographical exploration of global art history through The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. Contains: essays, works of art, chronologies, and keywords. Currently offers information about art up to 1600 A.D. It is housed, researched, written, and maintained by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's curatorial, conservation, and educational staff.
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Oxford Reference: Timelines270 Timelines, which can be easily narrowed to 13 discrete subject areas.
Encyclopedias, Handbooks, Histories, and Guides
Encyclopedias, Handbooks, Histories, and Guides offer general overviews of varying depth. These can be particularly useful for quickly orienting yourself to adjacent fields that impact your research question and for identifying key concepts that you will need to understand more fully in order to properly investigate your research question.
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Cambridge History of ChinaThe largest and most comprehensive history of China in the English language. Covers Chinese history from the 3rd century BC to the death of Mao Tse-tung.
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Oxford Reference Encyclopdias: Asian HistoryComprehensive, scholarly, in-depth, and peer-reviewed summaries on Asian history.
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Oxford Very Short Introductions This link opens in a new windowOver 700 short books in the Oxford University Press series "Very Short Introductions." Concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects that make challenging topics highly readable.
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Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and the full text)
Covering all aspects of the visual arts, this collection includes such key reference works as the Grove Dictionary of Art, The Benezit Dictionary of Artists, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.
Dictionaries, Glossaries, Vocabularies
Dictionaries, glossaries, and controlled vocabularies are useful for clarifying terms you've uncovered with which you're unfamiliar, as well as guiding you toward keywords for effective searching.
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Oxford Concise Dictionary of Art TermsAn accessible and useful A-Z, covering a wide range of terms from the visual art world, including materials, techniques, and important styles and periods. This resource is also searchable on the Oxford Art Online platform
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Getty VocabulariesStructured resources for the visual arts domain. Includes: Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Thesaurus of Geographic Names, Cultural Objects Name Authority, Union List of Artist Names, Iconography Authority, and Categories for the Description of Works of Art.
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Flora of ChinaScientific descriptions of thousands of rare, medicinal, and economically important plants of China.
Bibliographies
Bibliographies are generally well-scoped and selective, thus allowing you to focus on a smaller set of studies within a field.
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Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and some full text)
This is a key starting place for research in several different fields, providing bibliographies on current scholarship on topics from the social sciences and humanities.
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Oxford Bibliographies: Art HistoryAnnotated bibliographies on dozens of topics in art history studies listing authoritative, reliable, and relevant sources for research. Includes contextualizing introductions.
