English Research Guide

What the MLA includes:

• World literatures, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America
• Folklore: folk literature, music, art, rituals, and belief systems
• Linguistics: history and theory of linguistics, comparative linguistics, semantics, stylistics, and syntax to translation
• Literary theory and criticism
• Dramatic arts (film, radio, television, theater)
• History of printing and publishing
• History, theory, and practice of teaching language, literature, rhetoric, and composition

What the MLA does NOT include:

• Works exclusively on classical Greek and Latin literatures
• Works on subjects like aesthetics, human behavior, communication, and information processes, except as they relate directly to human language or literature

Languages

The majority of journals indexed by MLA are in English, although there are at least seventy other languages represented.  These include French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese, Norwegian, and Turkish.  If you'd like to limit your search by a particular language, see the box below.

Dates of Coverage

Most journals have coverage from 1926 to the present.

Full-Text Access

MLA is primarily an index but it does contains some full-text articles. If you need the full text of a book chapter or an article that isn't available in the database, click on the "Find It!" button. 

The Find It! button will tell you if the University Library has access to the material and where it is located.  If we don't have full-text access online, don't despair.  You can request the item through Interlibrary Loan.  Don't hesitate to ask a librarian for help!

Basic Search v. Advanced Search

• When you do a Basic Search, you are using one line with no specified fields, and a much smaller number of limits.  Because it will search for Keywords anywhere in the database, you are likely to find many more results.  *However*, only some of the results will be relevant, and so you will have to sort through all of the irrelevant hits.
• If you are looking for something specific, it will often save you time to do an Advanced Search.  This will allow you to search a number of different fields in a number of different lines, narrowing the focus of your search. 

Using the Thesaurus

• At the top of the EBSCO interface, there is a blue bar with a variety of different tools.  On the left, next to "New Search," is a link to MLA's thesaurus.
• Here you can search for Subject Terms used by the database.  To begin, try entering words that might be related to your topic.
• You can specify the type of search you want to do by clicking on the radio buttons next to "terms begin with," "terms contain," or "relevancy."
• Once you've clicked on a word or phrase, it will display Broader Terms, Narrower Terms, Related Terms, and Used For.

Using Subject Terms and General Subject Terms

• First, check the thesaurus to discover what words MLA uses to describe what you're interested in. You can use these terms to find all of the other items that have also been assigned those words subjects.
• If you're unable to find a heading in the thesaurus that matches your topic, try doing a keyword search.  This will return many more results than a subject search, but not all will be related to what you're interested in.
• When you find an item that looks relevant, look to see what Subject Terms have been assigned to it.
• In addition to Subject Terms, MLA also breaks down each item into General Subject Terms.  These include the subject literature, the period, the primary subject author, and the genre.  In some cases, an item will have multiple sets of General Subject Terms, like in this example.  You can use these General Subject terms in much the same way as the Subject Terms, to bring together all of the items that share that subject.

The content on this page was created by the University of Illinois University Library. The original content can be found on the Introduction to Library Research in English Literature Research guide.