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ENC 1102: Finding Literary Criticism & More (Dale Mabry): Tips

Selected websites and library resources for researching works of literature.

Search terms

"Search Terms" are keywords and phrases that describe your topic.

Here are some examples of using search terms to find sources

Try a word or phrase for your field or specialty, plus one of the following terms:
  • "war of the worlds" wells
    • Title of the work in "quotation marks" followed by author's last name.
      • Enclosing words that go together in quotation marks helps with phrase searching.
  • "war of the worlds" and wells and imperial*
    • Title of the work plus author's last name and topic keyword
      • The keyword truncated by the asterisk* picks up all forms of the word (imperialist, imperialism).
  • "british imperialism"
    • Topical keywords only.
    • Picks up material about the topic in general, not necessarily connected with a particular author or literary work.
  • wells, h.g.
    • Author's last name followed by a comma, and first name.
    • Lastname, Firstname search picks up material about the author's life and works in general.

When you get results:

eBooks, articles, and other online content may require a log-in - refer to the Help tab for more info.

Try your own search in PRIMO, the library catalog

Find books, articles, videos, & more

Using PRIMO to find literary criticism

This video shows how to find literary criticism articles in PRIMO (the library catalog).

Also demonstrates Bloom's Literature and Gale Literature, which are linked on the Databases page.

What are scholarly articles?

Many, if not most, of the articles that you will use in your research will be found in online library research databases. Many of these articles are considered scholarly sources—often identified as "peer-reviewed—and are described in the following tutorials and help sheets:

Scholarly content in literary research

Scholarly articles about literary works are often called literary criticism or critical articles. Literary criticism can be defined as analysis and interpretation of literary works by scholars giving their points of view.