Finding Journal Articles: English

The most current research on any academic topic is usually found in journal articles.

Step 1
Use indexes to find articles on a particular topic.                 

Article Databases are available through the Library's website for both on-campus and off-campus access. Off-campus users will be prompted for their UPEI username and password. Note that in addition to providing references to articles, some of the databases include the fulltext of articles.

Indexes and databases pertinent to English include:

Title Description
Academic Search Complete A multi-disciplinary database which provides full text for more than 8,500 periodicals, including full text for over 7,300 peer-reviewed journals.
Blackwell Synergy -- See Wiley Online Wiley Online is a multidisciplinary collection of online resources covering life, health and physical sciences, social science, and the humanities.
Canadian Poetry Audio Archive A bilingual poetry audio archive featuring a sampling of contemporary recordings of Canada's most acclaimed poets and transcripts of Canadian poetry.
Canadian Business & Current Affairs

Canadian Business & Current Affairs (CBCA) Complete; despite its name, it encompasses all subject areas, with Canadian focus, and peer-reviewed as well as popular magazine and news sources.

 

Proquest's Guide to CBCA (note the tabs along the top for different parts of the guide)

Chaucer Bibliography Online Provides citations to research literature on English writer Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-c.1400) from scholarly journals, books, and other sources.
Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database - CLCD

The CLCD Enterprise PreK-12 database is the premier academic resource for courses needing to locate Children’s and Young Adult books and other media.  The content includes millions of fiction/non-fiction titles, thousands of awards and quality reviews including author/title links, lesson plans and teaching guides.  The search engine offers multiple options including 50 search filters to find materials for determining interest & reading levels; selecting trade books based on standards; creating thematic, annotated biographies; interpreting reviews; developing classroom collections and more. 

 

Dictionary of Literary Biography (Gale)

Dictionary of Literary Biography contains biographical and critical essays on the lives, works and careers of the world's most influential literary figures, over 16,000 articles.

Early Canadiana Online A searchable full text collection of 3,000+ books & pamphlets documenting Canadian history from the first European contact to the late 19th century.
Gale Literary Index

A master index to every literary series published by The Gale Group. The Library has some of these in Gale Virtual Reference Library online and some in print, including Contemporary Authors (original and New Revision), Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC), NCLC, TCLC, Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB), Novels for Students, Short Stories for Students, and many more.

Gale Literature Resource Center

Find up-to-date biographies, overviews, full-text criticisms, audio interviews, and reviews on writers from all eras.

Literature Resource Center offers up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world. Its materials support interdisciplinary approaches, information literacy, and the development of critical thinking skills. The optional MLA International Bibliography module adds citations for hundreds of thousands of books, articles and dissertations from 1926 to the present, linked to full text where available.

Description provided by the database publisher, Gale/Cengage

Gale Literature: LitFinder

Access literary works and authors throughout history, including full-text poems, plays, short stories, speeches, and more.

LitFinder is international in scope, covers all time periods, and contains literature content, including more than 140,000 full-text poems, 840,000 poem citations and excerpts, 7,100 full-text short stories and novels, 3,800 full-text essays published in the 16th-20th centuries, 2,400 full-text speeches, and 1,250 full-text plays. LitFinder also includes biographies, work summaries, photographs, and a glossary. Within LitFinder 's collection, patrons have access to works from over 80,000 authors from 660 nationalities. 

LitFinder 's easy-to-use search paths allow users to easily target the information they are looking for or to browse the database through various refine search and results limiter options. For example, users can find everything from the sonnets of Shakespeare to the poetry of Maya Angelou, the love poetry of the 13th century to contemporary poems by African American women, the inaugural speeches of George Washington through George W. Bush, short stories by Edgar Allan Poe to stories by up-and-coming writer Elizabeth Weld, or essays on such subjects as the arts, science, and religion.

Person search quickly retrieves a particular writer or identifies authors linked by such qualities as gender, nationality, century, and genre. A works search provides similar limiters and the ability to browse works by thousands of subjects, themes, genres, and movements. Basic and advanced search modes allow users to search by keyword, author, subject, work title, work date, nationality, gender, century, and more.

 

(Description provided by the database publisher, Gale/Cengage)

Gale Virtual Reference Library

Thousands of full text reference titles across literature, music, business, social sciences, science, theatre, famous people (American and world), literary criticism and interpretation, and more.

Very heavy on British and American literature and authors.  A very good general biographical research database.

Historical Abstracts (European and World history) Indexes key historical journals, as well as a targeted selection of journals in the social sciences and humanities.
Ingenta Contains citations to research articles from over 13,500 scholarly & popular journals. Coverage includes the humanities, social sciences & science.
Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance Bibliographic database comprised of over 1.1 million citations of secondary source material pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700).
JSTOR

Provides access to archival issues of over 4,500 scholarly journals across most academic disciplines. Includes primary source materials.

The collections are the following: Arts & Sciences I to XV, Business IV, Hebrew Journals, Ireland, Life Sciences, Lives of Literature, Public Health, Security Studies, Sustainability, Global Plants, Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa, World Heritage Sites: Africa, and 19th Century British Pamphlets.

JSTOR also now includes over a half-million images from the ArtStor  "public collection", described as "images, videos, documents, and audio files from museums, archives, libraries, and faculty collections". Eventually all 1.3 million images currently accessible on the ArtStor platform will also be on the JSTOR platform.

Authentication note: If you create your own personal account within the UPEI institutional account, you can access everything UPEI has licensed by logging into that account directly from on or off campus without going through our proxy server. That is good for 365 days and can be easily renewed.

Faculty: If you want an entire class to have their own accounts, you can provide collections@upei.ca with a list of student email addresses, and we can upload them all in a batch - students will get email invites that they need to accept, but it makes the process much easier, if you want to use the collaborative research tools in the "JSTOR Workspace".

Medieval and Classical Literature Library Collection of the most important literary works of Classical & Medieval civilization. Search or browse by title, author, genre & language.
MLA Directory of Periodicals Provides detailed information on over 5,500 journals, with 4,400 currently indexed in the International Bibliography.
MLA International Bibliography - EBSCOhost Bibliography of journal articles, books & dissertations. Contains over 2.2 million citations from over 4,400 journals/series & 1,000 book publishers.
Oxford Academic

Oxford journals (about 240) and ebooks purchased from Oxford. This does NOT include the Oxford English Dictionary which is on its own platform.

Oxford English Dictionary Online Most comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Meaning, history & pronunciation of 600,000 English words, past & present. Updated quarterly. Fall 2023 Note: Notes: Oxford upgraded OED in July 2023, causing unplanned access issues. Off-campus users may be told mid-session that they don't have access and have to start a new session. Oxford is working on the problem.
Project MUSE Includes the full text of over 320 scholarly journals in the Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences fields.
Theatre in Video Contains over 400 plays & over 100 documentaries available online in streaming video, representing hundreds of leading playwrights, actors & directors.

 


Step 2

Locate the specific articles.

To find the article, you need to determine if the Library has the journal containing the article ... or the PDF of the article via one of our databases.

Many of our databases contain a GetIt@UPEI link for each of the search results.

Use this link to:

  • determine if the article is available full-text
  • determine if the article is available in print
  • request the article through Interlibrary Loan, if the article is not available

If you do not have the link, follow the same procedure, as above, by using the links from the Library web page

  • determine if the article is available full-text or in print by searching Find Journal Titles
  • request the article through Interlibrary Loan, if the article is not available

Bound print journals are shelved alphabetically by title on the Upper Level.

Please contact the Library's Service Desk, 902-566-0583, for assistance.

Created by: Cathy Callaghan, B.A., M.L.S.

Modified by: Suzanne Jones, B.A., M.L.S., and Katelyn Browne, B.S., M.S.L.S.
Date Created: 15-November-2008
Date Revised: 4-August-2023

Not specified