MLAIB Standard Search

The two great advantages of MLAIB are the wide, sophisticated range of language and literature journals and a search interface customized to language and literature topics.

Whereas in other databases the title of an author's work must be entered as a Keyword search, often resulting in false hits or passing mention, MALIB offers an "Author's Work" Subject search, guaranteeing the relevance of your results.

Below is the MLAIB "Standard Search" screen, followed by tips for getting the best results.

MLAIB Keyword Searches

Warning: These are NOT Google keyword searches! Google and its many imitators automatically place "and" connectors between all the keywords you enter. But MLAIB searches multiple words AS A PHRASE.

For example, if you enter the keyword Shakespeare and the keyword Marlowe with no connector, you will retrieve only the 4 articles that happen to use those words in exactly that sequence, whereas if you add an "and" connector between them, you retrieve 182 articles discussing both authors.

This same caution applies to "Title Keyword," a helpful search if you don't recall the exact title of an article or literary work. If you enter -- trees river across -- you get no hits, whereas if you enter -- trees and river and across -- you retrieve all the articles that discuss the Hemingway novel Across the River and into the Trees.

MLAIB Subject Searches

With standardized terms drawn from the 49,000 available in the MLA Thesaurus, Subject searches will often work best if you preview your terms by clicking the "select from thesaurus" link.

For example, if your "Author as Subject" is Leo Tolstoy, checking the Thesaurus will alert you that MLAIB spells the last name Tolstoi.
Likewise, the Thesaurus will tell you that the Wordsworth poem usually called "Tintern Abbey" should be entered in "Author's Work" by its full title: "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey."

MLAIB Search Limits

MLAIB is truly an "International" database, so it is worth while to limit your searches to the languages you are able to read -- for example, English.

Occasionally you may wish to examine the critical response to a work or author at a particular time. For example, you might wish to focus on the early critical reception of T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, or James Joyce in the 1920s and restrict the publication year to that decade.

MLAIB is such a large database that it may often be helpful to limit retrievals by type of resource.
For example, if you are mainly interested in journal articles -- for which you may be able to obtain full text using ArticleLinker -- check only the "journal articles" box.
Likewise, you might want to look at all the books and book articles seperately. And since dissertations are often difficult to obtain through interlibrary loan, you may want to omit them from undergraduate research projects.

Return to Search Guide home page.