 This video will teach you how to search the Gale Literature Resource Center, which is sometimes listed as Literature Resources from Gale. Gale Literature Resource Center is an excellent database to use if you are looking for sources to support a research essay about a novel, short story, poem, or other literary work. The database offers literary criticisms, topic and work overviews, author biographies, and the full text of some primary sources. Once you have logged into Gale Literature Resource Center, you can start your search. Unlike Google, which lets you use complete sentences, the databases require that you use specific keywords to search the collection. For more information on creating keyword, see the link in the video description below. To the right of the search boxes, you will see drop-down menus with pre-filled text to guide your searches to help you find sources quickly. Most students are able to find articles by filling in just one of these three boxes. You do not need to fill all three out, and doing so will increase the opportunity for error, and you may not see everything that is available on your topic. If you are looking for literary analysis on a particular short story, poem, or novel, the best choice is to type the title of that work in the second box to the left of name of work. Be sure to spell everything correctly in the search boxes. If you are not sure how to spell an author's name, for instance, conduct a Google search to find out the answer, and then copy and paste that in the database search boxes. If you are not sure of the work's title and nothing is showing as being available about that source, try searching for the author of the work. You might have just gotten a word wrong while you were searching. If you are still having trouble finding some excellent results, consider the subject matter of the work, and try keyword searching so that you can find literary analysis on the issue in general. When you are doing this type of keyword searching, you would not include the name of the work or author, since the articles you find will be about the genre or the style of works in general and not specific to your exact story. Once we have a results list to work with, we can evaluate it to see if the results are relevant. If there are a lot of articles which seem like they are talking about a different story or book, then using the limiters on the right side can help clean up our results. This is when I can click on Person About and see which authors are represented in this list and select the one I want and hit Apply. We wouldn't want to limit the search using the author items by unless we were looking for the full text primary source, meaning the story or poem itself. The search within Limiter would be helpful to limit to articles about that story, which align more closely to a specific theme you are focusing on with your essay. If we see that there are several book reviews showing up in the results page, then limiting by document type would be a good idea. Most professors would like students to use literature criticism. When we find a critical essay with a title that appears to connect to your working thesis statement, then you would open the article up by clicking on the title. At this point, you can browse the article. It's a good idea if you think there is even a small chance that this source would be helpful to go ahead and email yourself a copy. The email will contain the full text of the article as well as an auto-generated citation for this source. The citation can also be found by clicking the site icon on the source page. Please be aware that these citations are generated by an algorithm and this computer code rarely provides you with a perfect citation. You will still need to edit this. Sometimes the citations have incorrect capitalization. Sometimes they are missing information or adds extra information. Always be sure to check it against the examples provided by your instructor or on the IRSC citation lib guides. It's best to use the back button that is on the web page to return back to the search results. At any point, you may change up your search or search within to filter out irrelevant articles. One area that is often helpful for students is the topic and work overviews. These types of articles are helpful if you like assistance and better understanding the novel or short story you are writing about. Within some of these overviews, especially from short stories for students or novels for students, there is a section for criticism where short essays are written by experts. These can often be helpful for students needing another source about their topic. If you refer to these many criticisms in your essay, you will need to refer to the individual author who wrote the essay. This topic and work overview contains the work of several authors. List those that you use out separately on your work cited page and corresponding in-text citations. Remember, IRSC librarians are always happy to assist if you have trouble with any step of the search process. Check out irsc.libguides.com forward slash ask a librarian for information on how to connect to us about your research needs.