Expos 20: Breaking the Norm

Search the following databases to discover articles that reveal how a film or novel was received by critics and audiences, and to read scholarly analyses of a wide variety of motion picture and literary works.

Academic Search Premier (Ebscohost)

A multidisciplinary database covering many fields of study, from anthropology to history, to education and women's studies; its breadth is helpful when you're not sure who is tracking a topic you'd like to explore (or the kinds of questions researchers tend to ask in a range of academic disciplines). It offers an assortment of articles - some scholarly, some not. Reading a great piece in a highbrow magazine like the New Yorker or the Atlantic presents a comfortable way to start "listening in" on conversations that surround your topic.

Modern Language Association International Bibliography (MLA)

An essential index to scholarly studies of literatures around the world and from all time periods. The MLA also covers work in related fields such as folklore and mythology, linguistics, theory, film, and popular culture. Pro tip: Some fields are more reliable than others: Subject Literature, Time Period, author names, and work titles are more consistent; find the word used by the MLA and put it in your search box. Genre and Subject are inconsistent; what you see in one record won't necessarily appear in records for similar works, so you need to use lots of synonyms connected by OR.

Literature Online

There is considerable overlap with the MLA International Bibliography, but it’s still worth searching both. Includes full-text collections of primary sources, reference works, criticism, secondary sources, and biographies.

Film and Television Literature Index

The most comprehensive database for finding articles on films and filmmakers, as well as contemporary reviews of films, with coverage back to 1914 (although most coverage is 1980 to date). See also: Project Muse. For an in-depth list of similar resources that cover some material not found in Film & Television Literature Index or Project Muse, check out the Library Guide to Film Periodicals.

Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest)

A core resource for finding the scholarly research conversations of sociologists, social theorists, policy makers, and social and behavioral scientists. Useful for viewing issues or race, gender, sexuality, disability, and mental health through a sociological lens.

JSTOR

The first and still most widely known full-text journal database, JSTOR is trusted for its content. It covers core scholarly journals in 75 fields. The most recent issues of journals likely will not appear in a JSTOR search, however. This is because the publishers who work with JSTOR maintain a 1 to 5-year "moving wall," so be mindful if currency matters to you. Note: JSTOR Daily published an article titled: "Teaching Barbie: Scholarly Readings to Inspire Classroom Discussion."

FACTIVA (From Dow Jones)

A library database that's best for searching newspapers from (about) 1980 forward; the database includes the Boston Globe (1987-) and the Boston Herald (1991-), the two major MA papers, among many others worldwide.

Journal articles are the academic's stock in trade, the basic means of communicating research findings to an audience of one’s peers.

In some fields, especially the sciences, where information accrues rapidly and must be disseminated quickly, journal articles are actually the researcher's preferred means of communication.

In disciplines like social sciences and humanities, where knowledge develops a little less rapidly or is driven less by issues of time-sensitivity, journal articles may simply offer the more appropriate vehicle. Not all important and influential ideas warrant book-length studies, and some inquiry is better suited to the size and scope and concentrated discussion that articles afford.

Regardless of the discipline, however, journal articles perform an important knowledge-updating function.

Their quality and authority are established by other scholars, prior to publication, through a rigorous evaluation method called peer-review.

Searching the journal literature is part of being a responsible researcher.

It's the way you tap into the ongoing scholarly conversation. And it's the way you can be sure that the data you have or the scholarly conversation you’re following is in its most current form.

Essentially, a database is a collection of information that's been brought together, codified in some way, and made searchable.

The key point to remember about any library database -- and Harvard has hundreds -- is that it is constructed intentionally. Some things are included and some are not (you're never searching "everything") but there's always some principle of similarity among the information a database contains.

Sometimes, that similarity will be a format --a database can be made up of all news articles, for example, or public opinion polls, or visual images.

Sometimes the unifying feature is language, a geography (e.g. a database on Latin America), a particular time period (a database covering the Middle Ages or the 19th century, for example), or some combination of these things.

Research projects here at Harvard will often require you to look close up at a body of inquiry produced by scholars in a particular academic field. We call these subject databases.

Every academic discipline -- Anthropology to Zoology and everything in between -- has at least one subject database that's considered the disciplinary gold standard -- a reliable, (relatively) comprehensive, and accurate record of the books that scholars are publishing, and the ideas they're debating and discussing in important and influential journals.

 Librarians and course instructors will know the premier research database in a field, so ask them for recommendations when you're not sure.

Subject databases function like lenses: they can change what you see in research and how you see it -- and they offer you easy and efficient ways to bring your questions into sharper focus.

Databases can have radically different interfaces or radical differences in what they cover. However, research databases, more and more, follow certain design conventions. A lot of searching is about pattern recognition.

Expect to see features like these:

TWO TYPES OF SEARCH SCREENS: BASIC AND ADVANCED

• While basic screens are straightforward invitations to string words together (with AND, OR, NOT) and see where a search goes, the advanced search screens of databases are typically more powerful.
• Advanced search screens offer a host of other ways to manipulate language and more precisely and deliberately control and shape a search before you run it.
• And incidentally, advanced search screens  exist for familiar tools like Google, Google Scholar (just click on the ) , HOLLIS, and JSTOR

TWO TYPES OF SEARCH LANGUAGE: KEYWORDS AND SUBJECTS

• Keywords are the concepts you think up to describe your topic or information need.

• Subject terms, by contrast, come from a standardized vocabulary list and are chosen by catalogers or database creators to describe the intellectual content or emphasis of an item in precise and commonly understood ways.

Subject terms add value to a search by helping you find additional items that are related in emphasis, that cover similar content, or that have the same purpose.

Subject terms are what ensure that you get to all the relevant information on a given topic, regardless of the keywords with which you start. You might see them called descriptors  in certain databases.  Whatever the nomenclature, their usefulness is in helping  you get around the slippery nature of language.

SEARCH CONVENTIONS

OPTIONS TO FILTER, MODIFY, AND RE-SORT RESULTS

Most databases will present you with ways you can drill down into your initial search results to get better or just more targeted information to surface closer to the top.

Limiting to English (or another language), by resource type, to peer reviewed/academic journals, or to a range of dates are pretty standard ways of customizing a keyword search.

Most databases will rank results algorithmically by relevance, as Google does. If you prefer to see the results in chronological order, you should be able to resort your results by earliest date or have them display in reverse chronological order. You can also choose to rank by relevance if that's not the default.

In HOLLIS, these filters appear on the right side of the screen when your search results display. In most other library databases you use, you'll find them on the left side of the screen.

LINKS TO INFORMATION ABOUT ONLINE (OR PRINT) AVAILABILITY

Many journal databases now provide complete full-text of the materials they contain.  But just as many offer full-text more selectively. 

When full-text links don't appear, however, you’ll almost always see a button that looks like this: 

Clicking on it will initiate a search through Harvard's other library databases in search of full-text.

If full-text isn't available, the software will prompt  you to put in a Scan and Deliver request. We'll get you a PDF of the article, quickly, another way.

To use  with Google Scholar, follow the directions we give here.