Archer Library: Linguistics: Databases

Database Search Tips

AND requires all specified words to appear in each item

e.g. semantics AND metaphor

OR requires any of the specified words to appear in each item

e.g. homograph* OR homonym* OR homophone*

NOT excludes terms not desired

e.g. syntactic change NOT morphological change

Combining ideas

e.g. (dialect* OR regionalism*) AND (English language) AND (Canad* OR Saskatchewan OR prairie*)

prioritize your concepts to begin your search with the most important one
consider additional concepts to use, if necessary, to reduce or expand retrieval
if the database has a thesaurus, either online or print, check for suggested terms

Databases

MLA International Bibliography
An index to international journals, books, essay collections, proceedings, dissertations, and bibliographies. Subject areas: literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore. Coverage includes all modern national literatures.
Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is the comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 5,300 full-text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. In addition to full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 9,810 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
JSTOR
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Full text of backfiles of more than 1100 journals in the humanities, social sciences, sciences and education. Coverage is from volume 1 on, excluding latest 3-5 years.
More than 3 million of the images from Artstor are now available alongside JSTOR’s scholarly content.
Academic OneFile Select (Gale)
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Provides access to scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers across disciplines. The database meets research needs in subject areas including the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology
Project Muse
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Project MUSE offers access to full text of over 500 quality journal titles from 120 scholarly publishers. Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and others.
Oxford English Dictionary
Provides definitions and detailed etymological analysis, illustrated by quotations from a wide range of sources from around the world, making the OED a unique historical record.

Google Scholar

Having Problems?

Not finding enough material?

if you have combined several concepts using AND, start again and search only the most important one. Then add the next most important one, and so forth
look at each concept and see if you can think of additional synonyms (use OR)
if you are searching free-text, look at your terms carefully and think of ways to broaden your phrasing

Finding too much material?

look at a sample of the items retrieved; if a high proportion is not relevant, add another concept
sometimes irrelevant records may be eliminated by NOTing out a particular aspect or population
try limiting by language, date, form of material, particular field instead of free-text