ENWR 1510: Writing about Monsters

This guide was created for students in the ENWR 1510 section Writing about Monsters. This page includes resources to help get you started with your research on your chosen monster for your annotated bibliography and research paper assignments. Need more help? Contact Meridith or Haley.

See the Books and Ebooks tab for examples of ebooks and print books that talk about monsters. We have streaming monster films too! 

See the grammar, style, and citation tab for general grammar and style guides and resources for help creating citations and bibliographies.

The Tools for Access tab includes several tools to help you access library content from anywhere in the world. 

Both your annotated bibliography and resulting research paper will require research. In preparation, you will want to start thinking about possible questions/topics of interest related to the monster you have chosen. 

You will also want to spend some time thinking about how you will conduct your research. 

• Fine-tune your searches.
  Think broadly when brainstorming search terms. What synonyms or related terms could stand in for your key search terms?
  You can combine search terms using AND ("Frankenstein's monster" AND ethics ) and look for synonyms using OR (Bigfoot OR Sasquatch). Place terms you want to be searched as a phrase in quotation marks " ". 
  In many databases, the asterisk (*) is a truncation or "wildcard" symbol  that will match all possible endings for a word stem.  For example, ethic* will match ethics, ethical, ethically, ethicist, etc. 
  Most databases have filters or facets that allow you to narrow your results by subject, date range, etc. Limit your searches to help you find the sources you need. 
   
• Think about where you might find the type of information you are seeking.​
  Will you find the research you need in an e-book? An article? A newspaper? A documentary? An interview? For this assignment, you will likely be mostly looking for journal articles and/or essays/chapters from books. In general, though, when conducting research, cast a wide net when looking for the types of resources that could help answer your research question or support an argument you are making. 
   
• Know the difference between academic and non-academic sources, and when it's appropriate to use them.
  Most databases allow you to limit results to academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed sources. Be mindful of your assignment and what you're being asked to provide. Need a refresher? Watch the short video Peer Review in 3 Minutes.
   
• 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 similar topics. Scholarly books and articles will have works cited, bibliographies, or footnotes you can mine for additional resources. 

Need help? Ask a librarian.  

Some encyclopedia entries give a general overview of a topic while others can be more in-depth and scholarly in nature. Often, they will have citations or recommended reading for where to find more information on a topic. Take a look at a few monster-related encyclopedias we have at the library. 

The UVA Library has access to over 1000 databases. Below are a few that might be useful for researching your monster of choice. I've divided the databases by broad categories. (See an A-Z list of all databases) 
 

Multidisciplinary databases for research on monsters: 

Academic Search Complete is a large general database of articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers on many topics. Updated daily, it can be the best source for resources about very current topics.

The Social Science and Humanities Library provides online access to a broad range of journal content across 14 disciplines related to social sciences and humanities, including media and communication studies, library and information science, security and defense studies, business, management and economics, and education. Includes many journals published on behalf of associations, organizations, and societies related to these disciplines.

JSTOR includes older issues of scholarly journals in many disciplines including literature, from the start to 3-5 years ago.

Project Muse offers searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics, mostly from North American university presses. Older volumes are often available from JSTOR.
 

Monsters in Literature, Film, & Popular Culture:

MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB) indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages, as well as film, television, and popular culture, including over 4,000 journals as well as books and dissertations. For articles not available full-text in MLA, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries,” or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog.

Film and Television Literature Index includes reviews of films and articles on theory, preservation and restoration, writing, production, cinematography, and technical aspects of both film and television in the US and internationally.

ProQuest One Literature  is for scholars who want to engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research. It contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theater performances, and author readings.

Monsters in History: 

America History & Life covers the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to present with records from 2,000 English-language journals published worldwide.

Historical Abstracts covers articles about the history of the world from 1450 to the present, published in over 2,000 journals from many countries. (not the U.S. and Canada). 
 

Psychology of Monsters: 

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection includes abstracts and full-text of almost 600 journals in psychology and related fields.

Virgo, the UVA Library’s primary search tool, contains catalog records for books, print journals, DVDs, maps, and digitized materials, as well as links to online articles from our rich array of subscription journals. You can search catalog materials and articles together - a regular search will provide tabs for books, articles, and other materials. You can also use the Filter tools on the left  to limit your results by author, format, publication date, and more. 

Example subject terms related to monsters:

• Animals, Mythical
• Cryptozoology 
• Evil in Literature
• Folklore 
• Monsters 
• Monsters in Literature 
• Monsters in mass media
• Monsters in motion pictures
• Monsters in popular culture 
• Monsters on television
• Monsters -- Psychological aspects
• Mythology 
• Psycopaths in motion pictures 
• Sea monsters
• Vampires 
• Zombies

AI tools, like Chat GPT, can be helpful in the early stages of research. Depending on your topic, you might want to consider what  generative AI can do well and what its challenges are so that you aware when you are tackling your topic. When you are evaluating the AI tool you plan to use, be mindful of the following:

• How complete is the information? A weakness of AI is that it can only provide responses on the information it was trained on. Different generative AI tools have different knowledge banks and that will impact the information you receive in response to your prompt.
• Is the output consistent, regardless of the way you phrase the question? If you receive different responses to similar prompts, you will need to do additional source evaluation to determine accuracy and completeness. 
• Does the tool provide any attribution or source information in its responses? Check the sources provided by the tool. Are they reliable? Accurate? Relevant?

One thing that AI can usually do well is support your exploration of a topic and offer keywords or subtopics that you might not have considered. You can try using this prompt created by librarian Josh Thorud to direct AI to help you with this task:

AI Research Prompt (cut and paste both paragraphs):

You are a personalized research tutor called 'Keyword Helper,' guiding students to think critically about their chosen topic before they begin searching in databases. Your role is to encourage them to explore and define their topic deeply, focusing on developing a set of effective keywords for database searches. Start by asking open-ended questions to help them clarify their topic and think about different aspects like main ideas, related concepts, synonyms, important dates, people, and places. Guide them through the process of brainstorming and organizing these ideas without providing too much detailed information up front, so they are encouraged to discover it through research. Once the topic is well-defined, work with them to refine and finalize a list of keywords to use in their database search. 

Ask - what do you want to write about? Begin by asking the student to describe their assignment and what specific topic or question they are interested in exploring. This will help narrow down the focus. Encourage the student to brainstorm different groups of words related to their topic. These can be synonyms, related concepts, or even terms used by experts in the field. Main Idea: Help the student identify the main idea of their topic and expand it into a concept cloud by writing down anything related, using resources like Wikipedia for initial exploration. Dates, People, Places, Synonyms: Ask questions to help the student think about specific dates, key figures, locations, and alternative terms that might be relevant to their search. Refining Keywords: Finally, assist the student in refining and organizing these words into a coherent list of keywords that can be used effectively in database searches.