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Welcome! This guide can help you with research in your subject area.
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Research practice activity
Finding Secondary Sources
The Brontës' literary works have been analyzed extensively by scholars. You will find lots of books and articles of literary criticism on each of their books and on them as authors. To find articles on your exact topic-- such as the role of women or the supernatural in Wuthering Heights, you may have to try a few different search tools, and think of other ways of referring to your topic.
For example, when thinking about the role of women in Wuthering Heights, you might try searching for "feminism" and "Wuthering Heights" or try searching for the names of specific female characters in article databases or in the tables of contents or index of books of literary criticism on the Brontes or Wuthering Heights.
Below are a few tools that you'll probably find most useful for this class.
The below videos show how to use the tools. To be able to see the videos better, try first making them full screen by clicking on the square to the lower right of the video, and then on the little gear symbol to put the video in 720 px HD.
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Article databases The below tools search a large number of scholarly journals. Each tool includes different journals, so you'll get different results from each. |
In JSTOR, try an advanced search. JSTOR defaults to searching the full text of articles, so you might try adding more words to get closer to articles that are useful to you. Start by choosing "advanced search" to separate out the the words into different boxes.
Let's try the example of "Wuthering Heights" and the role of women. When you do each search, note how many results you get. When I searched "Wuthering Heights" and role of women, I got many results. This tells me that I could try the "search within" tool to add more words to the search and find more relevant articles. When you open the PDF of the document, try CTRL F and type in a word, such as women, to find all the instances where the author mentions women. This tells you if the article is relevant to you.
Try using the library's article search from our homepage or the search box below to search most of our EBSCOhost databases. You can try an advanced search so you can separate your search words into different boxes. You can try different combinations of searches, such as book title and character name or book title and concept (ie: supernatural). You can read the "abstracts" or summaries of the articles to get a feeling for the scholar's viewpoint. Here's a video that shows how to do a search in EBSCOhost.
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