Find articles and more
- MLA International Bibliography with Full Text
Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to the 1920s. The database contains millions of citations as well as full text for 1,000 journals.
Note: to watch the video on how to search, go to MLA International Bibliography on EBSCO
Our EBSCOhost databases will be moving to a new user interface starting Monday, May 19th, 2025 with the exception of CINAHL which will transition on August 1st.
For additional information about searching and managing results, please visit the EBSCOhost Transition Center.
Please send additional queries or comments to: ask@uic.libanswers.com
- JSTOR
Digitized back issues of scholarly journals with a rolling date of five years ago. Covers a wide variety of disciplines.
- Project Muse
Journals in literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others.
- WorldCat DiscoveryThe world's most comprehensive bibliography, with more than 49 million bibliographic records representing 400 languages. Covers information from 2100 B.C. to the present. Includes holdings information from libraries across the world.
- Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)LLBA covers disciplines concerned with the nature and use of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Complete coverage is also given to various fields of linguistics including descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics. Covered dates are 1973 - current, with monthly updates.
- Google Scholar
Searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
- PerseePersee provides open access to back files of more than 150 French scientific journals in the field of the humanities. Journals have moving walls of different lengths that block access to recent issues. Persee has advanced functionalities which facilitate and enhance use of the portal’s resources.
Tips for Searching the MLA Database
Use these methods to get better search results in the MLA Bibliography.
1. Use the database's standard spellings for names and titles
When looking for information on a particular author, make sure you are using the database's standard spelling. For example, if you do a search for Leo Tolstoy in the MLA database and click on a record, you'll see that the official spelling in the database for his name is Tolstoĭ, Lev Nikolaevich. Using this spelling will give you more results. The same is true for titles, especially those that have been translated in multiple ways.
2. Use the database's standard Subject Terms
Searching for topics can be complicated simply because of all the different words that authors might use to describe the same concept. For example, articles about gender roles in Tolstoy's novels might use very different vocabulary, like gender, women, or masculinity, and these terms might appear in multiple languages. Using more of the database's subject terms, such as marriage or female characters, can help you get more results.
3. Be creative about combining terms
Just because your first search doesn't give you any results doesn't mean there aren't books or articles on your topic. Beware of expecting to find one source that covers all aspects of your topic. For example, even if you are looking for articles on a specific novel with a specific topical focus like gender, you might find one source that focuses in depth on the work and another source about the author that shares your focus.
Use Subject Headings to find books with literary criticism
Use subject headings to search more powerfully in the library catalog.
You can think of subject headings like "tags" that the library uses to identify works on a common topic. For example, one of the easiest way to find books of literary criticism about Miguel Cervantes is to do a subject search using the catalog's official subject heading:
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 1547-1616 -- Criticism and interpretation
Start your search with the name of the author and add words for criticism or interpretation. For example:
You can also search by country and century. For example:
French fiction - 19th century - History and criticism
German literature - History and criticism
Once you've found a book that's relevant to your topic, click on one of the Subject headings/Topics in the record (for example, "War in Literature") and it will take you to more relevant books.
Follow the Scholarly Conversation
The more advanced you get in researching literary topics, the more you'll begin to see that you are not just looking for individual sources, but trying to follow the scholarly conversation: how scholars have addressed your topic and responded to one another over time. There are a few ways to get a sense of the scholarly conversation.
1. Start with an introductory work or encyclopedia (see the Background Info page) that can map out your topic and guide you to the most important secondary sources.
2. When you've found one useful source, use its bibliography to find even more sources. Let the work already done by experts make your own job easier!
3. Use the "Cited by" feature in Google Scholar to see which sources are most cited and to find out which other books and articles have cited them.
