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English Literature

A guide to resources in English literary studies.

Finding articles

Top recommended platforms for finding a scholarly article or book chapter for your Proposal and Annotated Bibliography assignment:

Citation chaining

Once you have found a relevant article, you will find a second article through a process called "citation chaining." Citation chaining is when you find an article/chapter that is cited by the article/chapter you already found. To do this, search through the paper's footnotes, endnotes, or Works Cited. The example below shows a paper that has footnotes at the bottom of each page.

Academic paper with footnotes circled at the bottom.

Once you have found an article/chapter in the footnotes or Works Cited that interests you, search for it by title in Novanet. If you cannot access it through Novanet, try Google Scholar. 

You can also "forward citation chain" by finding articles/chapters that cite the one you have already found. An easy way to do this is to search for the article by title in Google Scholar and click on the "Cited by" link. The example below shows an article called "Binti's R/evolutionary Cosmopolitan Ecologies" in Google Scholar. Clicking on the "Cited by" link would bring up a list of papers that have cited this one. 

Google Scholar search result with "Cited by 11" circled underneath.

Assessing credibility

As stated on your Proposal and Annotated Bibliography assignment, "In your annotation, you should briefly address the credibility of both the author of your source, and the publisher."

You can learn more about the author through a Google search. Consider things like educational achievements, university affiliation, have they written on this topic before? Do they have expertise?

The publisher is the organization that decided to put this article/chapter out into the world. How credible is that organization?

  • If your source comes from a book (ie., a book chapter), you can find the name of the publisher on the book (maybe on the spine or cover, definitely on the copyright page). You can also find it in the Novanet record. Here is an example of the Novanet record for the book Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-making Through Science Fiction and Activism. If you scroll down, you will find all the details including the publisher (there is also a screenshot below with a circle around the name of the publisher). You can learn more about the publisher through their website and other sources such as Wikipedia

Book record, with the publisher (University of California Press) circled for emphasis.

  • If your source is a journal article, have a look at the journal itself. Academic journals provide peer review and accept or decline article submissions based on their quality and contribution to the field. Is this a high-quality journal? The journal website (as per your assignment guidelines) and Wikipedia are useful sources of information. 

Citing your sources

You can create an MLA citation automatically in Novanet by clicking on the quotation marks and selecting MLA 9th edition.

However, double-check all automatically generated citations! A great resource for checking is the Dalhousie MLA Quick Guide. In particular, if you are citing a journal article, see page 12 (“Articles in Scholarly Journals”). If you are citing a book chapter, see page 12 (“Essay” under “Books: Contributions”).