Research Guides: ENGL 290 Research Methods McGraw: Methods

Choosing where to search

ENGL 290 Your Guide to Research Methods and Critical Perspectives

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Choosing the correct database can increase your "signal to noise ratio."

You can get more relevant results and fewer irrelevant ones.

Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
(includes Contemporary Authors) Access biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of more than 120,000 authors from every age and literary discipline. This database can be searched by name of person (author) the title of a work or by key words.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text journals, many back to the original issue. Provides access to journals in the arts & sciences, business, ecology & botany, and languages & literature. JSTOR's coverage typically begins 3 -5 years after the current year.
MLA International Bibliography with full-text This link opens in a new window
Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to the 1920s. The database contains millions of citations as well as full text for 1,000 journals.
Women's Studies International This link opens in a new window
Covers the core disciplines in Women?s Studies to the latest scholarship in feminist research.
Humanities Index This link opens in a new window
art, classics, film, music, performing arts, philosophy, religion, history
Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window
Includes all data from Humanities International Index(more than 2,300 journals and more than 2.9 million records) plus unique full text content.

Building a search string

A successful search process involves:

identifying the search terms that will return an optimal set of results,
or will lead to the discovery of relevant and appropriate sources.

Keyword searching: The first step is figuring out what the key words actually are.

The words are the key that unlocks the answer.

One technique is to actually tell someone (or the mirror) what you are trying to do"

Maybe something like " I am writing about what Jane Eyre can teach us about how gender was portrayed in VIctorian literature."

So your key words are:

Jane Eyre
gender
Victorian

If you are looking in a literature-focused database to begin with, "literature" probably will not be very helpful.

In the field literary criticism, either the title of the text, or the author's name will likely be one of your key terms.

"jane eyre" AND "gender roles"

Controlled vocabulary searching

This kind of search is different in that it uses a set of already-agreed-upon terms to link like concepts in one work to the same concepts in another (or others).

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851 -- Criticism and interpretation

Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900 -- Travel -- United States

Because of the peculiar construction of these "subject tracings" it's probably best to use them to track down additional relevant works once you have found a first one.

Making sense of results

Filters

These tools give you a way to narrow down your results to remove irrelevant records from your set.

Virtual Browse

This feature is unique to Alma. It shows you what titles are "on the shelf beside" the one you select.