MLAIB & ABELL
The MLA publishes an International Bibliography with 2 million records of books and scholary articles on literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore, from 1926 to the present.
The online MLAIB also includes records from the Language and LIterature Collection of the JSTOR database, giving access to some journals back to the 1880s.
LION links MLAIB citations to full text from 180 journals, and the IC Library's "ArticleLInker" provides links from every MLAIB citation to any full text available from another IC Library database.
MLAIB is larger than ABELL, it is not limited to English language and literature like ABELL, it does not mix book reviews and unpublished dissertations with scholarly articles like ABELL, and it offers superior Subject searching via the MLA Thesaurus. MLAIB recently completed a project to update all of its pre-1963 records with current MLA Thesaurus Subject headings.
The Modern Humanities Research Association publishes ABELL with almost 1 million records of literary criticism -- mainly books and scholarly articles -- from 1920 to the present.
ABELL's subject coverage is limited to language and literature in English, though recently it has expanded to film and cultural studies. It also includes literary works -- poems and short stories -- published in journals.
LION links ABELL citations to full text from 180 journals, and the IC Library's "ArticleLInker" provides links from every ABELL citation to any full text available from another IC Library database.
ABELL is a smaller bibliography than MLAIB with a narrower focus, but within its more limited range it includes criticism -- such as book reviews -- not available from MLAIB (and book reviews may be especially helpful when researching contemporary writers).
Studies of MLAIB and ABELL have substantiated what scholars already knew: literary research needs both. There is less duplication than might be expected, and each gives access to critical resources not available from the other.
Return to Literary Criticism in LION