LibGuides @ URI: SPA 325: Introduction to Literary Genres: Finding Articles

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Getting Started

Databases provide a way to search for articles on a number of topics. When searching in a database, you'll want to use key terms or phrases to find articles like when you search for books in a catalog.

You can search for a title of a work to find out more information about a specific piece of literature or you can search for an author to find out information about the author's works or to find items written by that person.

When searching, you can use a number of terms and combinations of those terms such as:

Garcia Lorca AND La Casa de Bernarda Alba

Garcia Lorca AND women AND drama

Databases

These are some of the databases that will be most helpful to you in finding articles.

MLA International Bibliography (ProQuest)
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Indexing and abstracts of journals, books, and other materials on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. 1926-. Updated nine times a year.
Literature Resource Center (Gale Cengage)
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Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors. Includes work overviews, plot summaries, and explications.
JSTOR
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JSTOR is an online archive of back runs of core scholarly journals in many disciplines. Articles may be searched by keyword or browsed by journal. JSTOR provides high-resolution, scanned images of journal issues and pages as they were originally designed, printed, and illustrated. Note that JSTOR is not a current issues database. Because of JSTOR’s archival mission, there is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between the most recently published journal issue and the back issues available.
Project MUSE
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Project MUSE offers full-text current and archival articles from 500+ scholarly journals from major university presses covering literature and criticism, history, performing arts, cultural studies, education, philosophy, political science, gender studies, and more. Updated continually.
Literary Reference Center (EBSCOhost)
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Literary Reference Center (LRC) provides full text from over 1,000 books, major literary encyclopedias, and reference works, as well as hundreds of literary journals and additional sources.

Logical (Boolean) Operators

Using logical (Boolean) operators such as "AND", "OR", and "NOT" can help narrow down your search and identify the most relevant articles.

Use "AND" to retrieve articles on both keywords. Use "OR" to retrieve articles on either one of the terms or both. Use "NOT" to exclude the information that you do not need.

Limiting by publication year, type of article, document type, or physical description can also help you find relevant articles.