To determine whether a journal is peer reviewed, search for it in Ulrich's Periodicals Directory and look for the little referee symbol: .
Use these databases to find scholarly articles, book chapters, and more. The top five cover a wide variety of literature topics, and the rest are organized by genre.
Visit the Starting Your Research Guide to learn about finding specific books and articles, choosing a topic and keywords, putting a search together, evaluating information sources, and more.
If you are looking for scholarly articles and books about a particular work of literature, try searching for its title (and, if needed, author). If the work's title is multiple words, put it in quotation marks. For example:
When you are using the Search the Library box at library.ualberta.ca (but not a subject-specific database), try adding the word "criticism" to help narrow your search to literary criticism. For example:
If you find a lot of results, try making the search more specific by adding key terms related to your research topic. Group any synonyms together with parentheses. You can use the truncation symbol (*) to make a word open-ended and find multiple variations of it. For example:
Are you looking for a definition of a literary term, or an overview of a literary period or genre? These are examples of the types of information you can find using the resources below. For more resources, visit Finding Background Information.
The online literature collections below represent a variety of genres, time periods, and geographic areas.