LibGuides: Literature: Basic: Databases

Medieval scholar and students

Databases for Background:

Most professors want your research to come from Peer Reviewed or Scholarly Sources. The sources listed here are secondary resources and not peer reviewed or scholarly. They are encyclopedia-like sources for quick background information. Usually they will have the work cited, reference, or source lists. You can locate the items in those lists for use in your paper. (There may even be links to them on the page.)

Literary Reference Center (Ebsco, TexShare)
Literary Reference Center features an expansive collection of author biographies, plot summaries & work overviews, full-text essays from leading publishers, literary reference books & monographs, cover-to-cover full text for literary magazines & journals, book reviews from the most prestigious publications, poems from hundreds of sources, short stories, classic texts, author interviews, and much more.

Gale Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline.
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Best Literature Databases

Remember you can limit your serch to Peer Reviewed or Scholarly Journals if that choice is given in the search interface. For any Ebscohost or ProQuest databases, use the advanced search option. Doing this will remove magazines, newspapers, and trade journals.

Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson, TexShare)
This database provides full text, abstracts and bibliographic indexing of the most noted scholarly sources in the humanities, as well as specialized magazines. Content Includes: Full-text articles from over 330 journals, high-quality indexing of nearly 700 periodicals, periodical coverage dating as far back as 1910

JSTOR This link opens in a new window
JSTOR is a full-text archival collection of backfiles of scholarly journals.
The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.

Currency of journals will greatly vary by publisher. Some journals date to the 1800s and are nearly full runs except for the most recent issues. If you need a more recent issue, use the citation in an Interlibrary Journal Request Form. request.

ProQuest
ProQuest is a large aggregated full-text database covering all subjects including language, literature, history and the social sciences and totaling more than 17,580 titles—with over 11,490 titles in full text. There are also options for creating an account to save and access your research.

Other useful databases

CQ Researcher

Electronic Journals Service (Ebsco)

Google Scholar (click more info for HCU recognition)

MasterFile Premier

Serials Directory (Ebsco) (TexShare)

TopicSearch

WorldCat (FirstSearch) (TexShare)