Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors. Excellent for critiques on contemporary authors. Most useful for contemporary U.S. authors. There's a great timeline useful for assignments outside of the English/Literature field as well. Watch the How to Use Literary Reference Center Plus video.
Access to over 200,000 full-text eBooks, many by academic and university presses published in the past ten years. Good for reliable background information on broad topics.
Access to full-text scholarly journals from a wide variety of fields. Contains the full archive of most journals, except for the current 1-5 years. Watch the How to Use JSTOR video.
Video Part 1- How to Use Library Databases to do Literature Research
Search strategy- be flexible and relaxed! Don't be discouraged if a search doesn't find any good resources- Try again!
Search lots of different databases, not just one
Find out if there's other worlds or titles for your text (Ex: "The Song of Roland" AND "La Chanson de Roland")
Keep track of your research using a separate document to copy/paste citations and links
Search Literary Reference Center Plus (best database for Literature research)
Use the date limiter to find articles published in the last 5 years
Use the citation generator to get the MLA citation
Use the permalink to save a permanent link to the article
Pay attention to the type of source (Ex: "Poem", "Literary Analysis", "Book Review", etc.). Reference entries are NOT scholarly.
Search e-books
Books often have literary analysis in the introduction or other chapters
You don't have to read a whole book to use it as a source! Just read the chapter or pages that are helpful to you.
You can search within an e-book for a specific word/title/character
Search JSTOR (good database for history, art, and literature)
JSTOR doesn't have many articles from the last 5 years, but still has lots of great information and worth searching!
Use quotation marks to make sure your keywords stay together (Ex: Search "Song of Roland" instead of Song of Roland to make sure it finds the phrase "Song of Roland" and not just the words Song and Roland anywhere in the article)
Search Academic Search Complete or OneSearch if you still need items
These databases don't usually have much on literature that you haven't already found in the other databases
OneSearch doesn't have as many filters or date limiters
Video Part 2- Examples (The Iliad, The Song of Roland)
