ENG 444/544 British Women Writers: Finding Articles

The first thing you should do when you have a research assignment is figure out what types of article sources are required or allowed. Some professors require you to use only scholarly peer-reviewed journals while others might let you use professional journals (also known as trade journals.

Scholarly article - written by an expert in the field and reviewed by peers who are experts in the same area. In many databases, you can limit your search to scholarly, peer-reviewed or refereed journals to weed out any non-scholarly content.

Professional/trade article - Trade or professional journals can have articles written by experts in the field or by staff writers. The articles are only reviewed by editors for style, so they go through a less rigorous review process. The articles often do not contain reference lists.

Popular journals - Written for a general audience rather than for professionals or scholars. Examples include The New Yorker, People, and Rolling Stone.

If the article you have found in a database doesn't have the full-text right there, click on the button to see if the article is available in full-text in another database. If we do have it, it will take you to a page that shows you where it's available (if you see a Download Article link, you can click to access the electronic copy).

While you can link to full text articles from your MLAIB search results, the search engine itself is looking at bibliographic, subject heading,  and sometimes words from an article abstract. SO that means you should use fewer words in your search statement and make use of the advanced features of the database.

Instead of just searching Zadie Smith as a keyword, use the 'Select a Field' dropdown menu to choose a more focused search for content about Zadie Smith.

You'll notice that the list of fields in MLAIB records is long; scroll till you find the one 'SA Primary Subject Author'; by selecting this field, the resulting articles you retrieve will be substantially about Zadie Smith rather than being about Zadie Smith among many other things.

Before you hit the search button, scroll down the screen a bit and see the many ways in which you can limit a search by using the MLAIB metadata.  For instance in the Publication Type menu, you can limit what you'll retrieve to Journal Articles.

As you review the results of your search and want to read one of the articles you've discovered, click on the Find it @ PSU green icon ().

Next you'll see the article information in PSU Library's catalog with a hyperlink to the server from which you'll get the article.  In this case you will be viewing the article from the Project Muse eJournals collection; the article was published in the journal 'Contemporary Literature' volume 56 issue 1 in 2015 starting on page 145 of that issue.

Here it is:

Suppose you want to identify articles about Zadie Smith that focus on her narrative methods. You can add a keyword in the second search box.  That will tell the search engine to find articles that are primarily about Zadie Smith and address some aspect of narration.  Notice the use of 'narrat*' - that's the first part of the word followed by an asterisk * which functions as a wildcard in the search. 'Narrat*' tells the search engine to bring back narrative, narration, narrator, narrators, etc. 

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This guide has been steering you towards literary search engines.  Another technique for finding articles is to search across an archive of humanities journals.