Literature: A Research Guide for Graduate Students and Faculty

DON'T reinvent the wheel

Many scholars have spent their entire careers in your field, watching its developments in print and in person. Learn from them! The library is full of specialized guides, companions, encyclopedias, dictionaries, bibliographies, histories and other "reference" sources that will help orient you to a new area of research. Similarly, every works cited list can be a gold mine of useful readings.

DO get to know your field

• Know Your Field, a module from Unabridged On Demand, offers tips, thought prompts, and links to resources for quickly learning about and staying current with an area of scholarly study.
• How do I find other sources that have cited a particular article or book? (Harvard Library FAQ) - also known as cited reference searching or reverse footnote-mining, this method helps you move forward from a really great source to the most recent scholarship on that same topic.
• Find Background (from the guide to Literary Research in Harvard Libraries) - how to find scholarly companions and guides that summarize and synthesize the research literature on a topic.
• Use HOLLIS to browse the literature section of the Loker Reading Room reference collection - Loker Reading Room, on the second floor of Widener, holds the most frequently consulted volumes of Widener's print reference collection. Use this browse to get a sense of the types of reference works that exist.
• James Harner's Literary Research Guide: an Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies - a discontinued classic whose 2014 edition is now freely available on GitHub. For many topics, a decades-old reference source may still be the standard. This is especially true for the types of reference sources that are less likely to be published today, such as directories, inventories, and guides to collections.

DON'T treat every search box like Google or ChatGPT

Break free of the search habits that Google and generative AI have taught you! Learn to pay attention to how a search system operates and what is in it, and to adjust your search inputs accordingly.

Google and generative AI interfaces train you to type in your question as you would say it to another person. They give you the illusion of a search box that can read your thoughts and that access the entire internet. That's not what's actually happening, of course! Google is giving you the results others have clicked on most while generative AI is giving you the output that is most probable based on your input. Other search systems, like the library catalog, might be matching your search inputs to highly structured, human-curated data. They give the best results when you select specific keywords and make use of the database's specialized search tools.

DO adjust your language

Searching often means thinking in someone else's language, whether it's the librarians who created HOLLIS's subject vocabularies, or the scholars whose works you want to find in JSTOR, or the people of another era whose ideas you're trying to find in historical newspapers. The Search Vocabulary page on the general topic guide for literary studies is a great place to start for subject vocabularies.

Learn more about searching:

• Database Search Tips from MIT: a great, concise introduction to Booleans, keywords v. subjects, and search fields
• Improve Your Search, a module from our library research intensive, Unabridged On Demand

Search technique handouts

DON'T search in just one place

No search has everything. Each system is useful for some tasks and less so for others. Judicious triangulation is the key to success.

DO SEARCH A VARIETY OF RESOURCES

There's always one more site you could search, but eventually you will experience diminishing returns. For most research projects, I recommend searching at least 4 types of systems:

• Your library catalog, HOLLIS
• A subject-specific scholarly index, such as the MLA International Bibliography, LION (Literature Online), or the IMB (International Medieval Bibliography)
• A full-text collection of scholarship, such as JSTOR or ProjectMuse
• One of Google's full-text searches, Google Scholar or Google Books

DO look beyond the library's collections

The library purchases and licenses materials for your use. Harvard's collections are some of the best in the world. And yet: there is a lot more to discover beyond Harvard, from open-access projects on the open web to other institutions' archives and special collections. Schedule a conversation with a librarian to discover the best resources for your specific project.