Why should I look for academic articles?
Why should you do research in academic journals?
- Academic journal articles are often authored by scholars active in a particular field
- Academic journal articles provide a close look at a particular topic
- Academic journal articles often provide data to support their findings
- Academic journal articles can lead readers to other sources through their bibliographies
If you find one good article that supports your research, you can use the bibliography at the end of the paper to locate further research.
Finding Articles through the BCC Libraries
BCC Libraries offer a variety of databases in which you can locate magazine, newspaper, trade, and scholarly journal articles. The databases below have been chosen especially for research for ENG102.
We also use 2 databases at the Boston Public Library that we do not own: Jstor & Literary Criticism Online. Both are listed below with an icon.
You will need a Boston Public Library E-Card.
Please watch the tutorial on the left hand side to sign up for an e-card.
Recommended Databases for English
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Dictionary of Literary Biography - Gale This link opens in a new windowFull text database providing biographical and critical essays on the lives, works, and careers of the world's most influential literary figures from all eras and genre. The award-winning Gale Literature: Dictionary of Literary Biography provides comprehensive access to the series dedicated to making literature and its creators better understood and more accessible to students and interested readers while simultaneously satisfying the standards of librarians, teachers, and scholars. The series provides reliable information on authors and their works in an easy to understand, engaging format, while placing writers in the larger perspective of literary history. Dictionary of Literary Biography includes the main series, documentary, and yearbook volumes.
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Literature Resource Center (Gale) This link opens in a new windowAn integrated research experience, Gale Literary Sources brings together Gale's premier literary databases in a new digital environment that allows researchers, faculty and students to search across these resources to discover and analyze content in entirely new ways. Literary criticism, author biographies, literary journals, overviews or 75,000 frequently studied works, and over 30,000 poems, short stories and plays. Includes Contemporary Literary Criticism-Select, an extensive collection of critical essays on contemporary writers.
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Gale eBooks (Virtual Reference Library) This link opens in a new windowFull text database providing subject specific dictionaries, encyclopedias and general reference books as well as the online version of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Subjects include science, history, medicine, psychology and mental health, literature, drama, film, popular culture, business, law, and more.
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JSTORA digital library founded in 1995. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now also includes books and primary sources, and current issues of journals. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals.
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Literature Criticism OnlineGale™ takes literature, history and culture to the next level with the largest, most extensive compilation of literary commentary available: Literature Criticism Online. Imagine centuries of analysis - the scholarly and popular commentary from broadsheets, pamphlets, encyclopedias, books and periodicals - delivered in an easy-to-use 24/7 online format that matches the exact look and feel of the print originals. The net result is tens of thousands of hard-to-find essays at your fingertips. It's all designed to raise the level of research while providing the around-the-clock remote access that today's researchers demand.
Other Suggested Databases
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Academic OneFile (Gale) This link opens in a new windowMulti-disciplinary database containing mostly peer-reviewed, scholarly articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources. Over 8,000 academic journal titles are included with extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and many other subjects. Also includes hundreds of podcasts and transcripts from NPR, CNN, and CBC, as well as full text New York Times content back to 1995. Coverage 1964 – present.
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Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowDesigned for academic institutions, this database is a leading resource for scholarly research. It supports high-level research in the key areas of academic study by providing journals, periodicals, reports, books and more.
