Where to Search - Find Scholarship and Criticism

Every search engine is different, and no one search engine has everything. 

Multidisciplinary, All-Purpose Search Engines

HOLLIS

HOLLIS is Harvard Library's main search interface. Search it at least once for every project.

  • A great place to start, no matter the field or topic
  • Search tips
    • Add AND criticism to find literary scholarship
    • Select "Library Catalog" to search for whole books on a topic
  • Learn more about what HOLLIS can do on the HOLLIS Use Guide and HOLLIS FAQs

Full-text search tools

These search a specific body of material, and they search all of it in full-text. (HOLLIS can search inside only some materials.)

  • JSTOR - An all-purpose full-text collection of journal backfiles, great for general research in the humanities, basic sciences, and social sciences.
  • Project Muse - Full-text books and journals in the humanities and social sciences from many major university presses plus a notable list of specialized publishers.
  • GoogleScholar - Extensive full-text search of academic publications, good for broad multidisciplinary searching, especially in the sciences and social sciences, gray literature, and for current or obscure topics.
  • Google Books - The largest available collection of books for full-text searching, great for history research or for exploratory searching in any field.

Beyond HOLLIS: Specialized Subject Databases

Subject-specific databases track only the scholarship relevant to their disciplinary areas, and offer advanced search options specific to those disciplines—for example, the MLA lets you search within specific literary genres

Literary Scholarship

  • 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.
  • ABELL (via LION's "criticism" search)
    • For anglophone literary scholarship. There’s considerable overlap with the MLA International Bibliography, but it’s still worth searching both. ABELL is especially useful for finding work by UK-based scholars, as well as academic book reviews (which the MLA specific excludes). Unlike the MLA, LION also includes full-text collections of primary sources, reference works, and biographies.
  • Oxford Bibliographies
    • Annotated bibliographies to the major scholarship on specific authors, literary themes, genres and movements. If there isn't a bibliography on your exact topic, search around for related topics and ideas.

Historical and Cultural Scholarship

How to Search

Don't Treat Every Search Box like Google

Pay Attention to Subject Headings