Finding Literary Criticism in LION
Clicking "Criticism & Reference" from LION's home page opens an "All" search screen that offers Keyword and Subject searching.
If your primary interest is literary criticism published in journals and essay collections, a good practice is to limit your search to "Criticism." This also adds new search options.
Now you have more ways to define what you want in both ABELL: the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature and MLAIB: the Modern Language Association International Bibliography.
LIke to know more about ABELL and MLAIB?
Click here.
Limits
Changing the Limit from "ALL" to either "Articles and Reviews" or "Books" is often the best strategy.
Retrievals from such large bibliographies can be overwhelming. Looking at the results from journals and books seperately can help you cope.
Looking at articles and books seperately also helps sort journal articles that may be available full text from books you may need to obtain from a library.
The criticism search automatically sets itself to "All" resources -- "Articles and Reviews" and "Books."
"Literary Works" refers to creative rather than critical pieces. It has little impact when searching for criticism and should be selected by itself if you are looking for poems or short stories published in literary journals.
LION TRAP:
When is a Keyword search
not quite a key-word search?
Click here.
Searching: Subjects
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams
Searching by Subject works much the same in LION as in other databases.
What is unique to a literary database like LION is the ability to search the title of a work as a Subject, guaranteeing that all articles retrieved will focus on the work.
This applies to all literary works -- whether a lengthy novel like Moby-Dick or the brief poem to the right.
LION retrieves 21 records on the Subject of "The Red Wheelbarrow."
Note the "Key" to the icons that appear to the left of each citation. If the "Full Text," "Page Image," or
"JSTOR" icons appear, clicking on them will open the full text of the article.
"Full Text" provides an HTML
file, while "Page Image" and "JSTOR" retrieve PDF files. PDF guarantees the original
page numbers, should you wish to cite the article in a paper.
The "Full Record" icon provides a complete citation, but no text. In the case above, click on ArticleLinker, which appears under citations as a green arrow.
These 4 "hits" for the same 2 articles illustrate the duplication you will find when searching MLAIB and ABELL together.
But note that you can choose to search MLAIB or ABELL seperately.
The "combined" MLAIB and ABELL search is powerful in terms of accessing all records from both bibliographies.
But the combined search is also limited by ABELL's subject headings, which are fewer and less detailed than those assigned by MLAIB.
Only by searching MLAIB seperately can you access the complete MLA Thesaurus of subject headings and enter standardized searches for concepts like "Theme," "Literary Influence," and "Literary Source."
Like to see a snapshot of all the extra options when searching MLAIB seperately?
Click here.
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