Find Scholarly Articles
Best bet for literary criticism:
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MLA BibliographyProduced by the Modern Language Association of America to provide access to scholarship on literature, language and linguistics, and related areas. Coverage from 1926 to the present.
Other databases with literary criticism:
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JSTOR Full-text access to thousands of scholarly journals covering the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, plus monographs and other academic materials.
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Project MUSE Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content; since 1995, its electronic journal collections have supported a wide array of research needs at academic, public, special, and school libraries worldwide. MUSE books and journals, from leading university presses and scholarly societies, are fully integrated for search and discovery.modules, designed to help researchers find reliable sources of information by directing them to chapters, books, websites, archives, or data sets.
Articles not available in full-text? Request through ILLiad, our interlibrary loan service. Some articles are sent in just a few hours.
In databases, look for Request from ILLiad or Request from another library links when you are directed to a screen that that says full-text is not available at Colby.
Scholarly Journals
Articles in scholarly journals are particularly important to academic research. They:
- report original research in a specific discipline
- use in-text citations and bibliographies
- typically contain peer-reviewed articles
Look for options in databases to limit results to articles in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals.
MLA Citation Help
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MLA Handbook by The Modern Language Association, the authority on research and writing, takes a fresh look at documenting sources in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook. Works are published today in a dizzying range of formats. A book, for example, may be read in print, online, or as an e-book--or perhaps listened to in an audio version. On the Web, modes of publication are regularly invented, combined, and modified. Previous editions of the MLA Handbook provided separate instructions for each format, and additional instructions were required for new formats. In this groundbreaking new edition of its best-selling handbook, the MLA recommends instead one universal set of guidelines, which writers can apply to any type of source. Shorter and redesigned for easy use, the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook guides writers through the principles behind evaluating sources for their research. It then shows them how to cite sources in their writing and create useful entries for the works-cited list. More than just a new edition, this is a new MLA style.Call Number: LB2369 .G53 2016 Colby Miller 1st Floor Reading Room Reference. Also Colby Miller 1st Floor Research Librarians AlcoveISBN: 9781603292627Publication Date: 2016, 8th Edition
Older editions of the MLA handbook are also available. Many databases still use the 7th edition. OWL uses the 8th edition. Note the differences! Be consistent.
MLA 7th Edition: Falk, Cynthia G. "'The Intolerable Ugliness Of New York': Architecture And Society In Edith Wharton's The Age Of Innocence." American Studies 42.2 (2001): 19-43. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.
MLA 8th Edition: Falk, Cynthia G. "'The Intolerable Ugliness Of New York': Architecture And Society In Edith Wharton's The Age Of Innocence." American Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2001, pp. 19-43. EBSCO, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40643250. Accessed 19 Jan. 2017.
Library Resources for EN 200 Foundations of Literary Studies
Photo: By Frank Schulenburg from Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Searching Tips
KEYWORD SEARCH
In library catalogs and databases, keyword searches only look for exact matches.
To narrow results, try using quotes to glue together words in phrases, titles or an author's name. "stream of consciousness"
An asterisk is a wild card that stands in for different endings of a word. ideal* = ideal, ideals, idealism, idealistic
SUBJECT SEARCH
Subject searches take you to books that have been pre-identified as being about that person or subject. Identify subject headings by checking the item records found in a keyword search.
To find subject headings for an author, do a Subject Search using the author’s name (last name first): Jewett, Sarah Orne (Select Subject from first drop-down option in CBBcat.)
Not very many search results? Look for broader subject headings in item records. Books covering broader topics may include chapters or significant passages on the author you're interested it. Check indexes and Table of Contents.
- Authors, American – Maine
- Women authors -- Maine
Following a Citation Trail
Check the works cited, notes, references and bibliographies of every relevant article or book. You may discover a book or article perfect for your topic.
Hafley, James Robert, 1928 - The Glass Roof: Virigina Woolf as a Novelist. Berkely: University fo California Press, 1954. (link to bibliography)
One good source can lead to another!
Look for a Cited Work using:
- OneSearch (articles)
- Google Scholar (articles)
- CBBcat (books, media available through Colby)
- MaineCat (books, media available regionally)
- Hathi Trust (sometimes has full-text digital versions of older books or articles)
- WorldCat (if can't find resource locally)
OneSearch
OneSearch searches multiple resources at once. It's most useful for precise, controlled searches.
Use Advanced Search and limit by format.
To find an article listed in a bibliography, enter title of article in top row search box. You may need to also add the last name of the author in the second box.
To find book chapters discussing a writer or an artistic work, enter the name of the writer or the work in the search box and check the box Book Chapter in the "Show Content Type" limiter.
To find book reviews, enter the title of the book in the search box and check the box Book Review in the "Show Content Type" limiter.
Other Library Guides
Reference & Historical Context
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Oxford English Dictionary The full text online version of the Oxford English Dictionary contains both the complete Second Edition and the New Edition in progress.
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Cambridge Histories Online access to texts in the Cambridge Histories series, with titles organized by subject, including American history, British history, philosophy, religion, science, and literature.
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Cambridge Companions From Cambridge University Press, subject- and theme-based collections of content covering literature, philosophy, religion, classics, cultural studies, and music, written by experts in the fields. Now a part of Cambridge Core.
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Credo General Reference A search engine covering hundreds of reference works, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses, and books of quotations, plus subject-specific titles covering topics such as arts, business, history, law, literature, medicine, music, philosophy, psychology, religion, science, and technology.
A database for articles related to history:
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Historical Abstracts Bibliographical coverage of the history of the world (excluding the U.S. and Canada) from 1450 to the present, with article abstracts from over 2,000 journals -- covering 1954 to the present -- plus citations to books and dissertations
Find Books
SEARCH our library catalog
Books in Miller Library? Look at the call number. Most literary works are on the bottom floors (S1 & S2) of the Miller bookstacks.
Books at the Colby Storage Facility, Bates or Bowdoin? To order click 
Enter your name and bar code number (omit beginning and ending letters) from your Student ID or Library Card.
Not finding what you want in CBBcat or MaineCat? Check WorldCat and order through ILLiad, our interlibrary loan service.
Good Research Takes Time
Keep a research log & document every search.
Explore a variety of search terms.
Check multiple resources.
Carefully evaluate all materials.
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Humanities Librarian
Contact me by email or chat (send me a Google Hangouts invite). Or let's talk about your research or information need on Google Meet or Zoom!