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This guide is designed to help students and faculty find research materials having to do with English-language literature. This page provides resources to help you develop a research topic and keywords, and provides some information on starting your research. Use the tabs on the left side of the page to navigate to further resources for finding and citing sources, as well as a summary of some of the services offered by the library.
Start here! The databases listed below can help you get started on your research. Visit the left-side tabs "Research Resources" and "Full Text Literature Collections" for further research collections.
Index to journals, series, and books covering literature, language and linguistics, folklore, film, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing from the 1920s-present.
Full text of more than 500,000 works of poetry, prose and drama from the 8th century to the present day. Includes more than thirty individual literature collections comprised of canonical texts, non-English language literature, and diverse underrepresented authors and their works. Supported with full text journals, criticism and reference resources extending to all aspects of literary studies, featuring coverage by the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL). Note: Database contains all content formerly in Literature Online (LION). Click more... to view a list of modules.
ProQuest One Literature searches these literature collections. Use the Literature collection filter within the ProQuest interface to select individual modules to include in your search.
Questions to guide the development of your research question:
Brainstorming keywords will help you refine your topic, find the most information, and save you time by helping you search databases in a more efficient and systematic way.
Another search strategy is to use subject terms or phrases. Subject terms are standardized word(s) that describe the main idea of an article or other source. In many databases, but not all, you can use subject terms or phrases to capture the different ways authors refer to the same concept. For example, in the database Academic Search Complete, you will find the following subject terms representing “colonialism”:
You can identify subject terms by looking at a source citation or abstract in a database, or under the Details tab in OneSearch. Subject terms vary by database, they are not always intuitive, and it is common to use both keywords and subject terms in constructing a search.
Like searching with keywords, it is a good idea to keep track of which combinations of subject terms you have searched.
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