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MLA or JSTOR?
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MLA International Bibliography is the research tool for literature because it most accurately reflects the state of literary studies in the United States and internationally. MLA includes listings of scholarly journal articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations, published from 1926 to the present. Abstracts are oftentimes not included, so you need to depend on subject headings to determine what the material is covering. Those subject headings are the key to organizing your search strategy.
MLA is excellent when you want to learn current research trends for an author or text.
JSTOR contains full-text articles published in scholarly journals from a wide range of disciplines, including language & literature. The most recently published articles (past 3-5 years) are not available, but much older ones are. Keyword searching can be tricky since JSTOR scans the entire article for your term(s). Choosing and combining your keywords is key.
JSTOR is excellent when you need historical research on an author or text, as well as when you want to learn who else cited a particular article.
Recommended Databases for Finding Articles
- MLA international bibliography (Ebsco)Provides a classified listing and subject index for books and articles published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage includes literature from all over the world--Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowProvides image and full-text online access of core academic journals in a variety of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
- Project MUSE This link opens in a new windowProvides online access to current issues of selected scholarly journals in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and mathematics.
- Gale literature resource center This link opens in a new windowProvides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, with in-depth coverage of the most-studied authors. Includes essays on the history of specific publishing companies.
- Literature online This link opens in a new windowProvides searchable full-text of more than 350,000 literary works in the English language--poetry, drama, and prose; 175 full-text literary journals; the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature; and reference sources including American Poetry and other bibliographies, biographies, and dictionaries. Individual units run from Anglo-Saxon literature, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the 18th and 19th centuries right up to the late 20th Century. The geographical span includes England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the West Indies, Africa, and South Asia.
- Literary Reference Source This link opens in a new windowProvides a broad spectrum of full-text information on thousands of authors and their works across literary disciplines and timeframes. Includes plot summaries, synopses, articles, author biographies, books reviews, poems, short stories and more.
- Communication & mass media complete This link opens in a new windowOffers "full text and cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for journals covering communication, mass media, linguistics, discourse, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication theory, language, logic, organizational communication and other closely related fields of study" (online database description).
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