English 130

Journal articles are shorter and more focused than books; because of that, you can search specifically for the work in question.

When you're searching in a database for journal articles, you can search by the name of the work.

You can search for two works at once, but such searches often don't turn up much. If you are doing this kind of search, it's often more useful to broaden your search by looking for criticism of the author for one or both works. 

MLA Searching Tips

• Use Name of Work to find criticism of the specific work you have in mind.
• Use Person--About to look for criticism on an author. This is broader than "Name of Work."
  • In most cases, Name of Work is good enough, unless a work has a very common title.
• Use Keyword to narrow your searches.  
  • You might not need a keyword -- try your search first without one!
  • It may take a few tries to find the best keywords.
  • If you have a word in mind with several possible endings, use a wildcard to search them all at once.
    • For instance, "femin*" will find articles with feminism, feminist criticism, femininity, etc.
  • Join keywords with similar meaning with OR. This allows you to search several keywords at once!
  • The best keywords are drawn from the subject terms appended to the articles-- read them carefully!
  • This is how you'll search for specific keywords describing the thing of interest about your work.
• Use Exclude Dissertations to get rid of the dissertations.
  • These tend to have fascinating titles but are seldom available. By excluding them, you avoid disappointment. 

Benefits and Drawbacks of MLA International Bibliography

Benefits

• Searches the most important publications in language and literature
• Allows searching by title of work, assuring that you will find everything on a particular work
• Subject indexing allows searching for otherwise difficult-to-find concepts
• Includes both journal articles and book chapters, which are difficult to find otherwise

Drawbacks

• Does not include full text (you must click through to see whether we have it)
• Can be difficult to come up with the right keywords

Full-Text Database Searching Tips

• Choose your search terms carefully! Remember, you are trying to use the same words the critics are using.
• Use quotation marks when searching for exact phrases or titles of works.
• Use built-in limiters:
  • Limiting by date is often useful.
  • In JSTOR, limit to articles. This gets rid of pesky book reviews.
  • In ProjectMuse, check out the subject terms on the left.
• If you need to search for a concept, you can't do it directly. You have to come up with words that are likely to be used in articles about it. 

In general, I tend to come to the full-text databases later in the search process, after I have already used MLA and the catalog to identify the most useful search terms. 

Sometimes, this is a very useful way to identify articles that deal with more than one critic or work, because it will pick up mentions and not just the subjects of an article. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Full Text Databases

Advantages

• Can search for a word or phrase used by an author or critic
• Can search for mentions of specific short stories or poems
• Convenient, because materials are available in full text
• Often includes interviews, which may not show up in MLA. 

Disadvantages

• Full-text databases only include the materials they were able to contract; if you rely on them exclusively, you will miss important work
• Can be difficult to narrow down results
• Can't search for concepts

Many students find the full-text databases easier to search, because they are more similar to web searching. However, it's best to incorporate other resources into your search process as well. 

And, one more resource you may find useful:

There's a lot of interesting material in OneSearch; try using the facets on the left to manipulate your results. 

Sometimes databases point to articles that aren't included in that particular database. MLA, in particular, never includes full text.

So--use the Find it button:  

There are several possible results:

• "Full Text Online" -- a link to the full text in one of our other databases
• "CUNY May Have a Copy" -- print items, or journals for which we don't have the issue you want
• "Request via Interlibrary Loan" -- this allows you to order things we don't have here