Finding Literary Criticism in MLA International Bibliography
We recommend creating a free EBSCO account to easily keep track of research. Click here for more info on that process. Creating an EBSCO account will allow you to set up "Projects" to keep track of articles for different purposes. For example, you can set up a project for your English course and save all your resources for that specific class in the same place.
This is the search box for MLA International Bibliography. You can begin your research by performing a keyword search using the title of your book, or the author.
This an example of a basic search for Ralph Ellison. Notice the quotation marks around his name. Using quotation marks will ensure that all your results will include the search phrase in the order typed.
You will likely get many results about your author, and you may see some links like this one that say "Check Other Library Databases for Full Text." This is an article that the library does not have access to - if you would like to see an electronic copy of this article, please fill out our Interlibrary Loan form, and we will be in touch! Please be aware that Interlibrary Loan can take up to 10 days to be fulfilled.
Under the search box you can find the database limiters. Check the box for "Online full text" (this eliminates all the results you don't have access to) and "Peer reviewed" (filters out articles that aren't peer reviewed). To ensure you get academic journal articles, check "Academic Journals" under the "Source type" dropdown menu.
This is an example of a record you will find in MLA International Bibliography. On the upper right hand side, you will see the following options: save (bookmark icon), cite (quotation marks icon) share (arrow icon) and download (down arrow icon).
To access the permalink, click on the share (arrow) button. This will bring up the full menu for sharing options. You can generate a permalink clicking the "Create link" option at the bottom of the page. You can also save the article to your Google Drive, or email it to yourself.
Once you become more comfortable searching in MLA International Bibliography, try adding more terms to your search. This is an example of adding the word "criticism" to my search for information about Invisible Man. Below you can see two different ways to use Boolean operators to connect search terms.
