Research Guides: English: Home

Getting Started!

A great place to begin a research project - particularly when honing in on a focused topic - is Gale Literature. Gale Literature finds literary criticism as well as biographical information, genre overviews and literary work overviews. Primary sources abound, too. Be sure to check out the topic finder, where you can build a topic based on keywords and see a visualization of the topic's progression.

Gale Literature Tutorial
Check out this brief (<2 min.) tutorial.

Gale Literature Search Tips
Some search tips for using Gale Literature efficiently including person and works searches, topic finders and ways to share documents.

Once you find some interesting articles in Gale Literature, save them in pdf format and go to JSTOR Text Analyzer. WIth this unique tool, you can upload a document. Then, JSTOR scans the article for key terms, people, locations, subjects and dates and provides the results alongside an interactive search interface. You may remove and add terms as needed and see the search results change in real time.

Best Bets - Reference

Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford) This link opens in a new window
Biographies of more than 58,000 men and women who have impacted British history and culture worldwide from the Romans to the 21st Century. Includes over 11,000 portraits.
Literary Encyclopedia This link opens in a new window
The Literary Encyclopedia is a constantly evolving and updating repository of authoritative reference work about literary and cultural history.
Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new window
OED is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. A guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words past and present from across the English-speaking world.
"As an historical dictionary, the OED is very different from dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You'll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you'll also find the history of individual words, and of the language traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books."
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Academic encyclopedia and dictionary entries defining and introducing topics in all disciplines. Entries include images, topics, titles, and mind maps.

Best Bets - Research

Gale Literature (Gale) This link opens in a new window
Simultaneously searches , Gale LitFinder, Something About the Author and Gale eBooks. Provides access to full-text literary works (novels, plays, poetry and short stories), author biographies, literary movement information, literary work overviews and more.
The (complete) Gale Literature database provides biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world. It draws from a number of Gale sources: Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Literature Criticism from 1400-1800, Shakespearean Criticism, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Short Story Criticism, Drama Criticism, Children's Literature Review.
One Literature (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Includes 500,000 primary texts 1,200 scholarly journals and thousands of ebooks and reference works. It also includes 1,300 video and audio recordings and the full text of 14,000 dissertations. ProQuest One Literature provides rare diverse primary sources as well as curated author/movement pages to help contextualize literary studies.

Note: ProQuest One Literature incorporates Literature Online (LION)
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
An extensive collection of journals and books in the Arts and Sciences, including classical studies, ecology, economics, history, language and literature, mathematics, music, art and architecture, cultural studies, film, folklore, performing arts, philosophy, political science, sociology, and religion.
Check out Mount Saint Mary's University's digital primary source collections in JSTOR!
MLA International Bibliography (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the MLA International Bibliography is the definitive index for the study of language, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, folklore, and film, covering scholarly publications from the early 20th century to the present. International in scope, it includes citations to journal articles, books, articles in books, series, translations, scholarly editions, websites, and dissertations, with links to full text in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other resources. The database also includes the MLA Directory of Periodicals and the MLA Thesaurus, a proprietary, searchable collection of thousands of subject terms, and personal names used in indexing the bibliography

Interdisciplinary News Sources

Access World News This link opens in a new window This database includes over 12,000 international and national news sources, representing 200 countries and more than 8 languages. There are over 300 California newspapers, too. Research diverse perspectives, topics and trends that align with curricular areas such as Political Science, English, Sociology, Humanities, Business, International Studies and more. Features reliable, credible information from a wide variety of local, regional and national news sources.Access California News Sources here.
New York Times This link opens in a new window NYTimes.com is a multi-platform news tool that provides full access to New York Times and International New York Times content, including breaking news, multimedia, podcasts, newsletters, live events and more. NYTimes.com is updated 24/7 with corresponding time stamps. The New York Times is also available in SpanishAccount Activation Link 
Search for and select "Mount Saint Mary's University - Los Angeles, CA.” Click “Create account” and use your @msmu.edu email. You will receive a verification email from NYTimes with a clickable url. Please verify your MSMU status. Students must enter a graduation year. when prompted. NY Times' Privacy statement: "Authorized Users, upon accessing NYT digital products, are subject to the NYT Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. For information on reproducing New York Times content, permissions, linking, privacy policy, and Terms of Service, please click the links below. The Terms of Service and Privacy Policy do not apply to the Participating Institution but only to its Authorized Users." http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/permissions/permissions.html http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/linking/linking.html http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/privacy/policy/privacy-policy.html http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/privacy/policy/privacy-policy.html http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/rights/terms/terms-of-service.html
Wall Street Journal This link opens in a new window While the Wall Street Journal focuses on business related topics and financial information, this semi-daily newspaper includes articles on political, medical, educational and arts news.Activation link
Subscription includes access to wsj.com, wsj mobile app, informative podcasts and curated newsletters.
Washington Post This link opens in a new window Coverage of the online version of the Washington Post from May 2016 to the present. Click "Create Alert" or "Create RSS Feed" to be updated via email/feed reader whenever new articles are added.
Los Angeles Times (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window Coverage to the online version of the Los Angeles Times from February 21, 2017 to the Present. Click "Create Alert" or "Create RSS Feed" to be updated via email/feed reader whenever new articles are added.