English: Texts Over Time 

Journal articles are not listed in the catalogue

To find journal articles on a topic for essays you need to search a database that indexes articles from English Literature journals.

Databases will provide details of the articles that correspond to your search words.  This can vary from just the citation: Title of the article and the details of the journal, volume, issue and page number, to the full text of the article.

Click here for a list of Databases for English Texts over Time

Follow the 3 easy steps below to find Journal Articles.

1. Determine some keywords or search that describe your topic

2. Select and search some databases using your keywords

3. Get the full articles if they are not linked from the database

A database search is similar to a catalogue search

The catalogue is a databases of books and journal titles etc

The MLA database (English literature database)  is a database of journal articles instead of journal titles and book titles

Use the Author and/or the Text as your search terms as you did in the library catalogue.

Examples

plath and ariel

hughes and birthday letters

Rosencrantz and guilderstern and stoppard

hamlet and film OR

hamlet and branagh

A search for articles about Ted Hughes Birthday Letters might look like this using the MLA Database

Select the Advanced Search

Choose subject from the drop down menu

MLA retrieves citations for both journal articles and chapters in books

This search finds 18 citations for journal articles and book chapters about Birthday Letters

You need to recognise the citations - book chapters are called Book articles

MLA does not have the articles on the database you need to locate them using the Library Catalogue - see below.

If the Full article is available there is a link from the database see below.  If not we need to find the article using the library catalogue.

Finding the article via the catalogue

Step 1

Look up the title of the article in a catalogue title search

Textual pratice

Do we have the journal?

Do we have access to the articles in 1999?

Step 2

Take the link to the journal site and navigate to the correct year, volume and issue of the journal that has the article you need

eg volume 13 issue no. 2 (1999) page 227

Step 3

Open up the issue link to see the table of contents and a link to the full article

Always choose the PDF version of the article if it is available

Search for your keywords on more than one of these databases.  You will get different results because they index different Journal titles. You will be able to find scholarly/peer reviewed journal articles on all your Texts over time essay topics.

Access to the databases

via this page OR  

Library Home Page -> Articles via Databases -> A-Z list OR

Library Home Page -> Articles via Databases -> Subject List -> Humanities & Social Sciences -> English

All databases are available for off campus searching. When prompted enter your University username and password.

This is a full list of Databases for English Literature.