Research Libraries of Note
Joe and Rika Mansueto Library – University of Chicago
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Research Databases
- MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new windowPremier resource for literature researchers. Indexes journals, books, and dissertations in the fields of language, literature, linguistics, and folklore. Provides access to some 5,000 journals.
- Academic Search Premier (EBSCO) This link opens in a new windowProvides full text for scholarly publications and peer-reviewed journals as well as general interest sources. Multidisciplinary. A good place to start your research.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowGoogle Scholar provides a simple way to search for scholarly literature. When accessing this database through the link provided here you will find free connections to the pay-for-view materials that are located in our subscription sources. Just click on "Find Full Text @SMU."
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Provides multi-disciplinary access to scholarly journals and books. Our collection (Arts & Sciences 1-IV and VII) is available in full text. To get more search results, change the "Select an access type" menu from the default "Content I can access" to "All content." Some of this content may need to be requested from other libraries (Interlibrary Loan).
Tips for Searching Databases
Multiple Key Words or Phrases: Place in separate boxes or separate by Boolean operators. Don’t string them together all on one line as you would in Google.
Put phrases in quotation marks: "gothic imagination" "pathetic fallacy" "queer theory" "reader-response criticism"
Truncation: Add an asterisk * to the end of a term to retrieve results with multiple endings. For example: roman* will retrieve records for romantic, romanticism, romance, romantics, etc.
Boolean Operators can help you expand or narrow your search.
AND: (hermeneutics AND Ricoeur, autobiography AND "feminist theory," allegory AND "Neil Gaiman") Narrows your search so that only records containing both search terms come back to you.
OR: (female characters OR women characters) Broadens your search so that all records containing the term female characters as well as all records containing the term women characters come back to you.
NOT: ("romantic poets" NOT Byron) Narrows your search so that you get records about romantic poets but none that are about Byron.