Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a comprehensive reference work cataloging all known living languages. Ethnologue has been an active research project for over 70 years involving hundreds of linguists and other researchers worldwide.
MLA International Bibliography offers a detailed bibliography of journal articles, books and dissertations. Produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the electronic version of the bibliography dates back to 1843 and contains over 1.7 million citations from more than 4,400 journals & series, and 1,000 book publishers.
Gale Literary Sources brings together Literature Resource Center, Literature Criticism, Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, LitFinder, and Something About the Author into a single cross searchable platform.
This collection includes all 2,800+ academic journals on JSTOR, covering more than 60 disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Also included are millions of primary sources from the 19th Century British Pamphlets, World Heritage Sites: Africa, Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa, and the Global Plants collections.
The JSTOR platform does not provide access to the most recent 3-5 years of a journal’s content. Current issues of journals hosted on the JSTOR platform are available through separate subscriptions on other platforms. Please check LibrarySearch for access to embargoed content.
Represents a range of modern and historical views on authors and their works across regions, eras and genres including: Contemporary Literary Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Drama Criticism, Poetry Criticism and Children's Literature Review. This database can be cross searched with the database Something About the Author.
Full-text biographies, critical essays and reviews, poems, short stories and plays of more than 130,000 international authors. This database contains the full content of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, and selections from Children's Literature Review, Drama Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, Poetry Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism and 11 other literary criticism series.
Project MUSE (Museums Uniting with Schools in Education) offers more than 300 journal titles from several scholarly publishers in the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, economics, and others.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) provides every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. The collection bears witness to The American Revolution, The French Revolution and The Industrial Revolution.
Now that you have a focus, you can start exploring subject-specific resources. Many times a topic is not only covered in one subject or discipline. Going back to the topic of social media influencers with a focus on authenticity, you could find information in psychology, sociology, business, philosophy/ethics, health, or education.
While most WMU databases are searchable in Library Search, at this point in your research, it's best to use subject-specific databases to narrow your pool of sources. For lists of subject-specific databases for other disciplines, check out our other research guides.
Citation Mining is a technique to find sources to understand the scope of the scholarly conversation around your focus. Once you find a source that is relevant to your work, look at the sources it cites or what sources it has been cited in. Some databases and search engines have this function built-in.
Use the arrows on Item Records to find sources cited in or cited by that source.
Click the link at the bottom of the search result.
Your research focus does not have to be static and unchanging. As you begin to collect more resources and see new themes and aspects, your focus will evolve.
You may discover that your research focus does not have as much information available as you thought or that the connections you thought were there ended up being not as strong as you thought. When this happens, think back to aspects and themes. If you were using an aspect approach, try a theme approach and vice versa. This does not mean that you have to start all your research over. The work you have done has informed where you are now.
In addition to looking at the bibliographies, reference lists, endnotes, or works cited lists at the end of helpful sources you have found, you can find a curated bibliography for your topic. Oxford Bibliographies are a great place to find annotated lists of important or influential works. Each bibliography has a brief summary of certain aspects of a topic and each citation has an explanation of why it was included.
MLA International Bibliography is a searchable collection of citations by the Modern Language Association (the same organization that created MLA citation style). This database is not searchable in Library Search so you may find sources here that you have not seen before.
There are many different ways to keep track of your notes as you research. Check out this guide for suggestions and an example.
TLDR
Check out our Citing Sources Guide for helpful resources on how to cite your sources in APA, MLA, and Chicago formats. Purdue OWL and Excelsior College OWL also have helpful guides for each style with examples. Always check with your instructor on what style they want you to use and if there are any specific modifications they would like.
If you're still unsure of how to cite something, contact a librarian.
Check out our Using Zotero research guide
Why use citation management software?