ENG 097 (Bair)

Welcome!  This guide offers a step-by-step approach to finding sources for your literature essay assignments in English 097.  Use the included worksheet to keep track of your search words.  Keep updating the worksheet every time you encounter more vocabulary or ideas for your essay.  

What are your search words?  

1.  Before you do any research, you need to be able to express your topic as a sentence and as a list of search words.  Academic research databases don't understand full sentences.  Instead, they are best searched using only the words that express the most important concepts in your research topic.  

Literature topics will usually have specific kinds of search words that you should know before your do research.  Some examples are below.  

COMPLETE SECTION 1 of the WORKSHEET NOW

2.  Now, write out your preliminary topic in one or two sentences.  This is just for a start, so keep it simple, using just two or three of the keywords you identified above.

WRITE YOUR PRELIMINARY TOPIC SENTENCE in SECTION 2 of the WORKSHEET NOW

Identify the words that represent the most important concepts in your topic sentence and write them out separately with the word AND in between them.

3.  For each of those words, write down some synonyms or closely related ideas.  In some cases, a text may be known by more than one title.

WRITE YOUR SEARCH CONCEPTS and WORDS in SECTION 3 of the WORKSHEET NOW

Recommended database for this class:  Gale Literature

Options for research include:

THE WEB:  This is not common for academic research papers, but there may be times when a professor allows you to use high quality websites found using a search engine or AI.  This includes using Google Scholar.

SUMMON:  The SUMMON search box on the library's website is a great place to start for almost any topic.  This search box searches a lot of the library's academic research databases all at one.  The drawback is that sometimes it can give you an overwhelming number of results, and it can be hard to find the most relevant sources for your topic. 

ACADEMIC RESEARCH DATABASES:  If your topic fits neatly into a particular academic discipline (e.g., psychology, literature, nursing, history...) then using a database for that discipline could get you the best results.  The drawback of using individual databases is that they may be too narrowly specific, and you may not find many results for your topic.  Or the articles you find may be too full of data or academic jargon for you to understand.  

When in doubt, try both SUMMON and doing an individual database search.  If you're stumped, ask a librarian!

Now you're going to test your search.  You're not actually looking for your sources yet.  Instead, you're testing your preliminary topic search words to see if they are effective, and to get ideas for more search words.  

4.  Try out your search in the recommended database.  Be flexible and try at least three variations on your search, using different setarch words.  Pay attention to how the results differ depending on how you search.  Do you get more or less results with different search words?  Does one search word seem to get more relevant results than another?

Example:

5.  Don't start saving articles yet!  Instead, use clues from these results to update your list of search words and possibly revise your topic sentence.

Example:  Seeing the results pictured below could give you the idea to include a discussion of gender when writing about heroism in Lord of the Rings.  Update your list of search words to help you remember these ideas.  Another result points out that "Lord of the Rings" is a fantasy novel.  You could add fantasy to the concepts in your list of search words.

Now the example search words list looks like this. 

TEST YOUR SEARCH NOW, and UPDATE YOUR SEARCH WORDS in SECTION 3 of the WORKSHEET NOW

Look at the description of your assignment and pay attention to what kinds of requirements there are for your sources.  There may or may not be requirements like this.  

• Are you expected to cite a specific number of sources?
• Are you expected to use sources from specific kinds of publications, such as "peer reviewed," or from books only, or magazines only. 
• Are you expected to cite your sources in a specific format, such as MLA, or APA?
• Has your instructor suggested that you use a particular database to search for sources?  [For this class, the library recommends using GALE LITERATURE]

ANSWER the QUESTIONS IN SECTION 4 of the WORKSHEET NOW

What is PEER REVIEW?

Scholarly publications are often peer-reviewed or refereed.  Peer-review is a process in which the articles or book chapters are evaluated by a panel of experts in the academic field before being published.  If they don't meet the publication's requirements for scholarship, it won't be published.  Using peer-reviewed sources is one way to ensure the credibility and authority of the information you cite.  Most databases have a search filter that will limit your results to peer-reviewed publications.

Academic vs Scholarly vs Peer Review?

Your instructor may sometimes use these words interchangeably.  These three words mean different things, but in general, if you use library research databases, and use the database filters to find journal articles (as opposed to newspaper or magazine articles), you will be using academic or scholarly sources.  If you're not sure what's required, check with your instructor.

When you're looking at a list of database search results, it may be tempting to quickly pick the first few articles you see, and then stop searching.  The problem with this approach is that when it comes time to write your paper, you may find that the articles you picked aren't relevant, are too long or too short, or are difficult to read and understand.  This will make writing your paper a lot harder.  Here are some tips for choosing the sources that will be most useful to you.

• Set both a goal and a limit for your number of sources.   If your requirement is to have three sources, then plan to save six sources when you search.  Choose quality over quantity.
• Use the "full text" option in the database.  
• Look at the first five results.  Do they seem relevant to your topic?  If not, you may need to revise your search.
• Pay attention to the length of the articles.  This may be shown as pages or words in a database results list.  Very short articles may not have enough substance to make citing them worthwhile.  
• Watch out for reviews.  Book, movie, or theater reviews from magazines and newspapers are not the same thing as scholarly literary criticism.  Generally, you'll want to avoid them.
• Use the summary or abstract to see if the article is useful.  Reading this short paragraph is usually enough to tell you whether or not the article is going to be something you want to save.
• When looking at each potential source, ask yourself how you think it could help you write your paper.  Does it say something you hadn't thought of before or does it back up something you were thinking of saying.  Does it offer examples or facts about your topic?  Does it have a very recent perspective?
• Does the article seem challenging but readable for you?  If it is overwhelmingly long or full of jargon, it may not be the best choice to cite.

FULL TEXT and PEER REVIEW

Make sure that the Full Text option is checked. Check the peer-reviewed option if you need to use peer-reviewed sources.

LITERATURE CRITICISM, BIOGRAPHIES, and OVERVIEWS

Most of the time, you'll want to be looking at the Literature Criticism results, but author biographies and work overviews could provide helpful background information.

CITE and EMAIL

If you choose a source to use for your essay, make sure you email a copy of the article to yourself, and get the correctly formatted citation to cut and paste.