English Language & Literature  Tags: english literature databases prose poetry fiction criticism  

Don't hesitate to contact me at any time for help with your research for this class, or any of your other classes.  If I'm not available, you can contact a reference librarian using our Ask a Librarian page.

• Choose the right keywords for your search.  Say your topic is about comparing the use of the terms "girl" and "man" in Disney films like Aladdin and  Beauty & the Beast.  You might start by searching on the terms gender, language and Disney, then make the terms more or less specific, based on your results.  Consider synonyms: for example, when searching for movies, don't forget to search for film or cinema as well.  Almost all databases support Boolean searching, which is simply the ability to combine search terms using "and" and "or".
• Know what truncation symbols are, and how to use them.  Most search tools provide a truncation symbol, which stands in for any letter(s) that might come after a search term.  For example, in the Virgo catalog, the truncation symbol is the dollar sign ($), and a search for south$ will find the terms south, southern, southerner, southerners, etc.  Most other databases use * as the truncation symbol, instead of the $. 
• When you find a good source, use it to find other good sources.  Use the subject terms and keywords associated with an item to find other items on the same topic.  Scholarly books and articles will have bibliographies and footnotes that you can mine for additional resources.

Use VIRGO, the U.Va. Library’s online catalog, to find materials related to your topic, including books, government publications, and audio and video recordings.  The Details button will show you publication information about the book or item, and the A Look Inside tab will often provide a detailed table of contents.

Sample searches:    

william labov [author] for all works written by the author
'black english’ [title] for all works containing that exact phrase in the title
Truncation: linguistic$ for linguistic, linguistics, linguistically, etc.
Booleans: language and advertising [subject]
english and dialect$ and south$ [subject]

You can also try out VIRGObeta, the new library catalog currently under development. VIRGObeta features relevance ranking, faceted browsing, and many other improvements.

Where to start: Begin by searching Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA), a database that contains scholarly journal articles and reviews of scholarly books on all aspects of the nature and use of language. 

Academic Search Complete is a huge general database covering all subjects, which is an advantage when you're researching an interdisciplinary topic like "Language in the U.S." Academic Search Complete will help you find scholarly articles from a wide range of sources.  It will also find articles in popular magazines and newspapers, which are useful if you want to tie your topic to current events or political debates, analyze media coverage of an issue, etc.

The subject of this course, Language in the U.S., is broad and interdisciplinary.  As you move deeper into your research, you may benefit from databases that cover specific aspects of language.  Depending on your topic, you may find the following resources useful:

Language in literature: The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) is the most comprehensive resource for finding scholarly articles (as well as books and dissertations) about literature.  It is not a full-text resource, meaning that you can only search the description of an article, rather than its full text.  To get the full text of an article, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries”, or look up the journal title in VIRGO.

Sociological and anthropological aspects of language: Sociological Abstracts indexes books, journal articles, and conference papers in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences.  As with MLAIB above, you will need to use the "Find article @ UVa Libraries" link to connect to the full articles. Anthropology Plus includes articles, reports, and other materials on all aspects of anthropology, including linguistic anthropology. 

Language in education: Education Full Text includes articles covering all aspects of education.  Recent articles are available in full text.

Biological and psychological aspects of language: Web of Science is a huge interdisciplinary database with excellent coverage of the natural and social sciences.  PsycINFO is the most important database for articles and books on psychology (also included in Academic Search Complete). 

Language and the media: Communication & Mass Media Complete is a large database of journal articles about communications and media (also included in Academic Search Complete).

Finally, Google Scholar will find articles from most online scholarly journals, plus some books and Web sites, across all subjects.  Although the search interface is familiar and easy to use, the results can be overwhelming, and the coverage is better for the natural and social sciences than for the humanities.  If you click on "Scholar Preferences" and choose U.Va. as your library, you will see the "Find@U.Va." button in your Google Scholar search results, which will allow you to connect directly to the full articles when available.