English 130 Library Tutorial Module 3: Searching for Criticism on a Work

Searching by Title

If you’re interested in criticism on a specific work, you can search it by title. This may look a little different depending on where you are searching:

• In MLA International Bibliography, you can specify that it’s a title by searching it as Primary Subject Work. This can be really helpful when works have unhelpful titles (like Passing).
• In JSTOR and many other databases, it’s useful to put quotation marks around a title, like this: “Sense and Sensibility” -- you’ll find that this strategy ensures that you will only retrieve results using the title as a phrase, not disconnected words.
• It’s helpful to add the author’s name if you need to distinguish between works with similar titles (like H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man vs Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man).

I’ve included a video demonstrating these searches.

Testing Title Search Strategies

I’d like you to try these strategies for yourself! In JSTOR, try searching for Kate Chopin’s short story, “The Story of an Hour,” with and without quotation marks, and with and without her name.

What differences do you notice?

In MLA, you can also test the Primary Subject Work function. Emma is a good example here. What happens when you search without specifically searching it without doing a Primary Subject Work search? What about when you do use that kind of search?

You might not need these strategies for every search you do, but it’s a good idea to get used to using them, since they’re often useful.

Should I Add Keywords?

Only if you’ve retrieved too many results to look through! If there isn’t much criticism on a work, you don’t need to add more keywords.

Keywords will give you a smaller list of results, so they aren’t helpful if your list of results is already small.

For instance, if I search for criticism on Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel Tehanu, I find 12 results. That is a small enough number for me to at least look at all the titles and decide whether I want to read the articles themselves. I don’t need to see a smaller list!

On the other hand, if you’re writing on a more thoroughly studied book like Beloved, you might have lots of results -- far more than you could evaluate -- so you might need to add keywords.

Some words make better keywords than others! Here are some categories of words that often work well:

• Titles of works and names of authors
• Words associated with the specific critical lens you are using

• Names of lenses: Marxist, feminist, historical, postcolonial, etc.
• Associated words (for Marxist criticism, these might include words like wealth, capital, social class, and so on)

• Themes

• The important thing is to find a word that’s used consistently to describe the idea you want. So for instance:

• Marriage is a better term than communication between spouses
• Associated concepts can help you here too. If you are writing about surveillance, that’s a great search term! But privacy and hypervisibility might be good ones too. They’re not synonyms, but they are closely related to the original concept.

• Contextual/Literary terms

• Words like narration can help you get at specific aspects of the text
• Genre words like science fiction, slave narrative, etc. can be good search terms

• Names of characters aren’t always good search terms, but sometimes they work really well.

• Very distinctive names can make good search terms
• Especially if you are searching a full-text resource like JSTOR, minor characters’ names may make better search terms than main characters’ names. If you are studying Wuthering Heights, a search for Nelly Dean narrows your list of results much more than a search for Heathcliff.
• Names of characters who are associated with specific themes can be good proxy searches for those themes. If you’re interested in antisemitism in The Great Gatsby, Wolfsheim makes a good search..

Lenses

If you are writing about the book from a particular critical lens, such as Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, etc., that lens may serve as a rich source of keywords.

For instance, if you are using a feminist lens, you can try searching for works that explicitly use that word. So, your search might look like this:

The * symbol in femin*  is a wildcard. That means it’ll pick up an any word that starts with the letters before the *, for instance:

• Feminist
• Feminism
• Femininity

And so on.

However, this search might not pick up every article that is doing a feminist analysis! Some of them may analyze feminist themes without specifically using that word.

Concepts related to the lens may also make excellent search terms. For instance, if you are interested in feminist analysis, you might consider words like women or gender. For a Marxist analysis, wealth might be a good word.

Take a moment to brainstorm some terms related to a lens you’re thinking about using for your paper. If your class isn’t using critical lenses, don’t worry! We’ll deal with other kinds of keyword brainstorming later on.

We can use these words to expand our search. An expanded version of our earlier search might look like this:

This search retrieves more results than our previous search because we used the operator OR. OR means that any item including at least one of these terms will show up in our search results.

Other Kinds of Keywords

In addition to keywords based on a critical lens, elements of the work related to your analysis may also make useful search terms.

If I were doing a feminist analysis of Passing, I might include “marriage” as a keyword, because the experience of women within marriage is an important theme in the book.

If I were taking a postcolonial look at The Tempest, I could try searching for Caliban, since his character seems deeply entangled with colonial ideology.

Evaluating Relevance

So your search probably brought up some articles and book chapters. What’s the fastest way to decide which ones you want to read?

• Titles and subject terms describe what the article is about
• In some (though by no means all) cases, there may be abstracts describing the content of the article
• If you have the full text of an article or a book chapter, you can search for your keyword within that text to see how often it comes up and in what context
• If all else fails -- skim through the first page to get a sense of what the article is about before committing to reading the rest of it.

Note that in the process of making this evaluation, you may find additional keywords that you might add to your search!

Exercise I

What critical lens are you considering using in your paper? If you are not using a critical lens, is there some theme within the work you’re considering analyzing?

Aside from the name of the lens (or theme), brainstorm three important words associated with that lens (for instance, some concepts that the lens describes or explains). It’s even better if they are related to the work you want to write about! It’s okay if these are the same as the ones you came up with earlier.

Now, write down two or three words describing the aspects of the work you are analyzing which the lens is helpful in understanding. These might include specific situations or concepts that come up in the work, or even the names of characters.

Of the terms you’ve written down, which ones do you think might make the best search terms? Why?                 

Make a note of them for the next module.

Exercise II

We’ll look at databases in the next module, but right now, let’s take a moment to experiment with and refine our keywords.

Using a search tool of your choice (perhaps OneSearch, GoogleScholar, Academic Search Complete, MLA International Bibliography, or JSTOR), try a search using the keywords you’ve generated above. Write down the search terms you used here:

First box:

Second box:

Third box:

Note that if you are putting multiple, closely related terms in the same box, you can join them with OR to search both at once. (for instance: masculinity OR patriarchy)

Hit “search” and look at your search results. Take some time to consider the following questions:

1. Did you find a very large or small number of results?
2. Do your search results look like they are all part of the same conversation, or all they all over the place?
3. Are any of your search terms bringing back results you didn’t expect? Which ones? (This happens a lot when words have multiple meanings!)
4. Scan over your list of search results (without clicking on anything)  for any words that would have fit well in your search. Did you find any?

Taking the answers of these questions into consideration, try experimenting with your search terms and searching a few more times. Here are some strategies you might want to try:

• Removing search terms (especially if your list of results is too small)
• Adding in terms you saw among your search results
• Substituting different terms
• Filtering your results by whatever means the tool you’re using facilitates

Write down the search terms you used for your most successful search below, so you can refer back to them in the upcoming modules.