Try these online databases to find literary criticisms, peer-reviewed articles, and other scholarly information about your author and novel.
Remember to choose FULL TEXT, if available.
Scholarly articles are:
in-depth | written by experts | validated with technical language, abstracts, literature reviews, methodologies, tables, graphs, and conclusions | reviewed by experts | given a bibliography
Popular articles are:
brief overviews of topics | written by journalists | easily read by most people | illustrated with colorful photographs or pictures | reviewed by editors | not given a bibliography
Primary sources:
provide direct or firsthand evidence of an event or person | creative sources can be primary sources | historical documents | legal documents | statistics | interviews | video recordings | audio recordings | photographs | correspondence including emails and letters
Secondary sources:
provide a summary, analysis, evaluation, or opinion about primary sources | journal articles | literary criticism | books | films and documentaries
How can you tell if a source is a scholarly article? Think back to RADAR.
Visit this page to see a diagram of a typical scholarly article. The authors' names, the publication date, the journal title, and the references should be clearly listed. You can check to see more information on any journal to see if the articles published in it have gone through the peer review process.
| Rationale | The article was created for the purpose of informing others. |
| Authority | The author is an authority on the subject of the article, typically an English/Literature professor at a university. |
| Date | The date will be clearly listed on the detailed record and on the full text of the article itself. |
| Accuracy | Scholarly articles have been peer-reviewed for accuracy. |
| Relevance |
Scholarly articles are intended for use by students and faculty. Choose articles which relate to your topic. |
To log in to the databases, you will use the same Rivermail e-mail address and password you set up to log into MyPioneerPortal. First-time users of MyPioneerPortal can create their password by following the instructions you receive in your activation email. To reset your password, select "Need help signing in." The librarians cannot reset MyPioneerPortal passwords, if you need additional assistance visit the tutorial on MyPioneerPortal.
Truncation Add an asterisk (*) to a root word to expand your search. For example, searching with the term femin* will result in articles containing the keywords feminist, feminism, feminine.
Limiting Limit your results by searching for full text, peer-reviewed, date, and other limiters.
You are probably familiar with book reviews. Book reviews are usually a small paragraph in a newspaper or magazine that comments on a book. Book reviews are written for everyone, click here to see one from The New York Times.
Literary criticism is a longer, in-depth analysis about an author, a literary work, or even a single character, theme, or occurence in a literary work. When searching for research to write a paper in a college level literature class, you NEED to use literary criticism, click here to see an example from the Journal of International Social Research.
The databases will offer both. Make sure you can tell the difference.
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