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Last updated:
Monday, 23 January 2006
Conducting Your Academic Literary Research
For the writing you do in this course (and in
general this applies to writing expected of you in other college courses),
you will want to focus your energies on finding essays and articles
published in academic publications. Other publications that reach a
more educated audience such as Time, Newsweek,
US News and World Report, Harpers, The
New Yorker, and so forth would be acceptable sources to use in
your papers, but you will find very limited literary criticism.
When you decide to use the Net to locate
sources to use in your writing, apply the same consideration to selecting
electronic sources as you would to choosing print sources. One of
the mistakes students often make is carelessly choosing electronic sources
because they are easy to find on the World Wide Web. However, when
searching for electronic sources, realize that in addition to the Web, you
should exhaust some other avenues first. Many of these resources are
accessible via the Internet and a Web browser, and they are more reliable
than just going to your favorite search engine and doing a query on a
topic. Consider, for example, subscription
databases.
Subscription Databases
A subscription database is a good place to
start before conducting a broad Internet search for Web pages. One
that Fullerton College
subscribes to is EBSCOHost. This resource will allow you to look up
articles that have been published in various periodicals such as
newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. (Nota
Bena: This database is accessible from a remote location like your
home computer as long as you have the userID and password I distributed in
class. From the Fullerton College library or campus computer labs
domain, you do not need to know the userID and password.)
This database is searchable by author, title, subject, or keywords.
Pick relevant keywords to help focus your search. Your sources will
always give you critical information about the source: author, title,
periodical name, volume, issue, and page number. You will need this
bibliographic information to compile your Works Cited page, so you should find
some system to record it. The search results basically will be
of two sorts:
1) bibliographic information (the database will
indicate whether the source is part of Fullerton College's holdings;
2)
bibliographic information and a full-text article.
If you find a relevant
source that has a full-text article, you can print it out, e-mail it to
yourself, or download it to your floppy disk. An electronic version
is the smart form to use since it is possible that you will be citing,
perhaps even quoting, from the source. The electronic format is
flexible, and you can always print it out later if you want to read from
the hard copy rather than the screen.
By going to the Fullerton
College library home page, you will find additional databases to
use. Of particular value for this Introduction to Literature course
is GaleNet.
You can access it by clicking on the link, then clicking the AUTHENTICATE
button. Here you can search three resources all at once: Contemporary
Authors, Contemporary Literary Criticism Select (CLC Select)
and The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB). I highly
recommend these databases before just jumping onto the Web. You will
find plenty of full-text articles here.
Another source you might want to try is the
Electric Library, again available by going to the Fullerton
College library home page. This source requires a userID and
password, which you can get from me in class or in the library if you want
to access the database from off campus.
I would highly recommend that you look for
journal articles in the reference section of CSUF's library since you may
not find enough of what you need in FC's subscription databases, like
GaleNet. At CSUF's library, you can access these databases for free;
unfortunately you cannot do so from home (like you can with FC's
databases) without authenticating yourself with a username and password.
Once at a computer workstation in CSUF's library, you should investigate
the following literature index databases. Although others exist,
these are the primary ones that will yield excellent search results for
you:
You will see a little bit of overlap among these indices.
The MLA Index primarily will give you the bibliographic source
information that you need to look up the journal's LOC (Library of
Congress) call number in the OPAC
before you can locate that journal in the book stacks. Be sure to note
whether your target journal is located on the second floor (north) or in
the basement's compact holdings. Searching in JSTOR and
ProjectMUSE will return digital copies of articles in PDF format and
you can either print these out or download them to your computer directly
for use. These are the same as if you had gone to the book stacks,
found the journal article and photocopied it yourself.
After exhausting your searches in the online index
databases, you might consider looking at a website called
FindArticles.com.
You will sources similar to those in JSTOR and ProjectMUSE
that have been licensed for the public to use.
Whether you are majoring in English or transferring to a
four-year university to study in a different discipline, I cannot
recommend enough the value of knowing how to conduct academic research by
using these digital tools like the ones that CSUF and other local
universities have available. The more exposure to and practice you
have with using them, the better equipped you will be to succeed when you
transfer from Fullerton College.
Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs)
Don't forget that you also can remotely
access Fullerton College's
online public access catalog
(OPAC). You can mostly find book and periodical titles relevant to your
topic; but
as the library expands its holdings, links out to the Web can be found for
some sources. An advantage to this search tool is that you can
search for the sources you want at home, then go to campus and pick them
off the shelf, then check them out. If you happen to live closer to
Orange Coast College, Golden West College, or Cypress College, you can
search those college libraries and check out sources from that location
instead. Fullerton College is just one place to access an OPAC.
You may even want to search through the
library
holdings at California State
University, Fullerton, since the campus is nearby, and it is a larger
institution with more resources.
Once you are finished investigating these
databases and online catalogs, the next step is to consider locating
sources on the Web. You should be familiar with different search
engines and how they differ from one another. A good source is Terry
Gray's "How to Search
the Web: A Guide to Search Tools." Another web site worth
exploring is Search Engine
Watch.
Evaluating Internet Resources for Research
Here is some required reading for evaluating
the value of Internet resources.
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