ENGL 786: Introduction To Graduate Study: Articles and Books
Bibliographic Databases
The two most prominent bibliographic databases for ECL are MLA International Bibliography and ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, which is searchable through ProQuest One Literature). These databases index journal articles, dissertations, and book reviews to an almost exhaustive degree and include links to full text when available through UNC Libraries subscriptions. For items where full text is not available online, ILL can provide a scan of our print copy or obtain a scan from another library. Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
- MLA International BibliographyA major index for literary criticism, linguistics, folklore & cultural studies. Includes articles from several thousand journals and series published worldwide. Also covers relevant monographs, working papers, proceedings, dissertations and bibliographies. Also searchable under "Criticism" within Literature Online.
- ProQuest One LiteratureIncludes and expands upon resources from ProQuest Literature Online (LION). Includes literary criticism as well as primary texts and reference works. Contains 3 million literature citations from a wide range of sources such as scholarly journals, monographs, and dissertations, along with more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings. Features notable collections from Chadwyck-Healey, such as African American Poetry, American Drama, and English Poetry. Provides access to the ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature) index of bibliographic citations for literary criticism.
Other Resources for Secondary Scholarship
JSTOR and Project Muse are widely used, full-text database of scholarly literature. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global can provide useful bibliographies and models for structuring your own work. Google Scholar provides the "cited by" feature which traces an article's topic from the time of publication forward. When combined with an article's bibliography, you are then able to locate a project within a scholarly conversation. Be sure to configure your Google Scholar account so that you gain full access to articles provided by the University Libraries.
We have additional ECL databases, as well as hundreds covering other fields, on our E-Research by Discipline pages.
- JSTORProvides an image archive of important scholarly journal literature in nearly all the humanities and social sciences disciplines, international and foreign areas studies, and many of the sciences. UNC patrons have access to extensive retrospective holdings of hundreds of journals, starting with the first issues. Excludes the most recent 2-5 years of currently available journals.
- Project MuseProvides access to important university press and other scholarly publisher e-journals mainly in the humanities and social science content for the scholarly community.
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses GlobalIndexes US dissertations from 1861 with full text available from 1997; masters theses covered selectively including some full text. Citations for dissertations from 1980 include 350-word abstracts, while masters' theses from 1988 have 150-word abstracts. Selectively covers dissertations from Great Britain and other European universities for recent years.
In addition to this database, the full text of the majority of UNC theses and dissertations from 2006, and all beginning in 2008, are freely available electronically from the UNC Library: Dissertations | Theses - Google ScholarEnables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Finding Books
Start with a keyword search in the catalog. Once you have located a relevant item, you can look at the Subjects in the record and follow those links to find related books.
You can also refine your results by using the facets on the left side of the screen.
English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism
Adjust the facet on the left side of the screen to expand your search to Duke, NC State, and NCCU Libraries. To expand your search even further, try searching WorldCat.
- WorldCatOCLC's WorldCat is the world's largest union catalog containing of millions bibliographic records for items in the collections of thousands of libraries from many countries. This database includes all the records cataloged by OCLC member libraries in several hundred languages.
Carolina BLU and Interlibrary Loan
ILL and Carolina BLU can help you get a copy of books or articles that we don't own, but it's also where you can place an item on hold or request a scan of an article not available online!
The Big Five
Five publishers have bought up a large portion of academic journals. One benefit is that you can search across journals on their websites (the library pays for most of this content).
Searching Within a Journal
If you find a specific journal title that is relevant to your topic, you can search for the title in our catalog. After clicking on the button for "Full text available via the UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries" button, it will take you to a screen similar to the one above where you can search inside the journal. More search functionality will be found within the database, but this search strategy is especially useful if years of coverage are across multiple databases.