ENGL 249 U.S. Latinx Literature (Moreno)

This guide is for students in Dr. Michael Moreno's U.S. Latinx Literature class.

Find Scholarly Articles

Find Scholarly Literary Analysis

Your assignment requires you to find and use two pieces of literary criticism, one introductory source and one scholarly article in your analysis. To find relevant articles, you will need to consider many more.  

To find scholarship, remember to limit your search to scholarly (peer-reviewed) journal articles.

  • Book reviews are not scholarly articles, even if found in scholarly journals.
Extend our Collection: 

Scholarly Article Search Strategies

You will find few if any scholarly articles specifically about your plays in Holman Library databases.

For example, in the Holman Library One Search: 

  • "My Ride, My Revolution" returns four sources
  • "The Republic of East LA" returns 9 sources
  • "Luis Rodriguez" returns 18,000 + sources (Most are not about your author)
  • "Luis J. Rodriguez" returns 611 sources (Most are not about your author, but more of them are.)
Search Terms & Tools

Try the following strategies to find relevant articles on the themes and ideas you want to explore in your essay.

  1. Try a range of search terms.
  2. Keep keywords simple and connect concepts with AND to focus or OR to simultaneously search for synonyms and related ideas.
  3. Use NOT to exclude sources, such as reviews in JSTOR.
JSTOR
  • Limit search to “articles” 
  • Use * to truncate words: cuba* finds cuba, cuban, cubans, cubanismo 
  • At Journal Filter - Narrow by Discipline, Limit to: Language and Literature and Latin American Studies
Academic Search Complete
  • Limit search results to Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals  
  • Use subject headings to limit your searches

Subject terms: ASP

  • Find Subject Terms:

Find Subject Terms

find-subject-terms2

WorldCat (you may borrow articles from other libraries at no cost to you):
  • Limit to Articles at Format

search-worldcat

Purdue e-Pubs:
  • click peer-reviewed only
  • limit search to “all repositories”
  • try a search on your author first – it may or may not yield results
  • try a search on a theme from your author – use ethnic identity words as search words
  • make sure the article you choose is not a book review

e-pubs search

Track the Scholarly Conversation

Advanced Researchers use many different strategies to track down resources on a subject. Try the following:

Search by critic/scholar name to see what else that person has written - hopefully on your subject.

In ProQuest and Academic Search Complete, once you open an article record by clicking on the title, the author's name is a keyword link to all that person's works indexed in our collections. (WorldCat would offer a more comprehensive overview).

You may also just search the author's name. Change the Search Field to AU Author.

To track citations and abstract only articles, use the Holman Library Citation Linker. 

Enter the title - or its start - "in quotes" and search. Ex: "The English Court Scene in Macbeth"

To search for books, articles and more, use the Holman Library Primo One Search tool:

If you cannot find it in our collection with One Search, try a search in WorldCat. You may borrow the perfect article for free with InterLibrary Loan.

Find Scholarly Books

Books can be scholarly too!

How can you tell? 

A scholarly book will: 

  • Be written by an expert or experts in the field (PhD. or academic affiliation)

  • Presents original analysis 

  • Language and ideas are sophisticated and in-depth

  • Often published by a University Press

  • Written for other academics 

  • Include extensive references to other scholarly work

While you can limit a search for articles to scholarly (peer reviewed) journals, you cannot do the same with books. 

You can, however, use the library’s online catalog to look for scholarly books: 

Search the Library Catalog to find books containing literary criticism

To find criticism of authors and their works, try a search using the author's name and the word criticism.

Note that the introduction to an author's work is often a great source of criticism. You will not find that using the search term criticism.