Literature in English: MLA Bibliography: journal articles & essays

This guide assumes that you want to learn about how to find articles that you don't know about yet.  However, if you have an article citation or the title of an article, see the instructions here:, Find Specific Articles in Full Text.

This series of short videos covers how to search for articles and essays using the MLA database. These videos walk you through searching and then using the navigation tools to link to the full text content in PSU Library's holdings of books and journals.

Watch a video of a simple search in MLA Bibliography.

Watch a video showing you how to use MLA's Primary Subject Work filter.

Watch a video that combines searching for articles and chapters on a particular work with a keyword.

You can narrow your search results by a topic related to your work or author. Add a keyword in another search box to narrow your results. In this case you would retrieve only those records about The Great Gatsby where the word 'class' also occurs in the article title, subject headings, etc.

You can also use two other search techniques:

truncation  - use a symbol (the asterisk *) that tells the search engine to find that word root and any ending.  In this example the search engine will retrieve capital, capitalist, capitalism, etc.

OR - you can use a synonym for your concept and the search engine will retrieve records with either term. In this case 'class' or 'wealth' or some form of the root captialism.