7 Monographs, Dissertations, and Essay Collections

“Books” are important sources for research, but it’s not a very precise term. Usually, researchers or instructors who refer to books primarily mean scholarly monographs— long, published works by a single author (or occasionally two or three working closely together) that have a single topic and cohesive argument to make about that topic. But sometimes they mean a collection of essays by different authors on different topics, but united by a central theme, concern, or purpose, that are published together. These works typically have an editor or small team of editors who help create a cohesive book, but each essay stands alone and may be similar to a journal article in terms of format and length. The best place to find books and collections of essays for music topics is RILM, but they will also be listed in WorldCat. Of course, “book” can also refer to novels, memoirs, and popular nonfiction, for general audiences, some of which may be useful in your research.

Dissertations are also book-length scholarly works, and like monographs they are by a single author. Since dissertations are written as the culminating work of a doctoral program, they typically are very thorough on background research for the topic, and make a new argument. While many PhDs in fields like musicology end up publishing their dissertations in other forms, like monographs and articles, most DMA students do not go on to publish that work. This means that often dissertations are the best place to find thorough, up-to-date research on performance-centered questions. To locate dissertations, use the Dissertations & Theses Global database from ProQuest. Some are also hosted on digital repositories owned by the university where the work was completed.