Here is an MLA mini-manual produced by Wright State's Writing Center. This manual covers the new 7th edition of the MLA Handbook. The library also has a guide called Citing Your Sources that covers MLA style.
The University of Wisconsin's Writing Center created this great MLA guide that will take you step-by-step through the citation process.
You find books in catalogs or databases. You can search the Wright State catalog to see what wer have here in the building or in the Southwest Depository. You can also search the OhioLINK catalog if you're having trouble finding books on your topic. If you're searching in the OhioLINK catalog, remember to click on the X OhioLINK libraries have this item link to see if Wright State owns the book before you request it.
You can also find books in a database called WorldCat. WorldCat has all the stuff--books, journals, archives, sound recordings and more!--from most university libraries in the US. If you're looking for a book, be sure to put a check here:
When you get your list of results, check to see if the book is in the Wright State library (the green symbol will be there); if you want to see if it's in OhioLINK or if you can request it via Interlibrary Loan, click the "See more details about locating this item" link.
You will see your options here (click the Find It! button to see if it's in OhioLINK):
You need to find scholarly (also known as academic or peer-reviewed) articles for your research paper in this class. You can find this kind of article in the databases below. If you're not sure that what you located is truly a scholarly article, compare it with the handout Dr. Owens created called Is It A Scholarly Article?
Academic Search Complete
This article database covers practically every subject. Be sure to put a check next to the Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals from your results page to limit your search to just academic/scholarly journals (otherwise you'll get newspapers and magazines as well).
If you get too many results, you can limit by date to just the last few years (over on the left side of the screen). See below for more ways to improve your results.
Many of the articles are full text, in which case you'll see one or both of these links: . If all you see is this link: , be sure to click on it, because there is a good chance the article is available full text online from another one of the library's article databases. Clicking Find It! will also show if the library has the article in print.
Other article databases where you can find articles include:
JSTOR
JSTOR has mostly full text for journals going back to the 19th century and ending only 2-5 years from the present (a very small number of journals will have articles up to the present). Focus your search by following these steps:
Anthropology Plus
Combines Harvard's Anthropological Literature and the Royal Anthropological Institute's Anthropological Index. Covers the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies.
There are lots of articles in French, German, etc. in this database; limit to English from the drop-down menu "Language Phrase."
Social Sciences Citation Index
You can do cited reference or author searches here. This is useful for seeing who is citing a particular author or who has cited a specific journal article.
Again, as you look at your results list, consult the Is It a Scholarly Article?
handout. Although you have limited to only scholarly journals, items
from a scholarly journal are not necessarily all articles. Response
letters, book reviews, news blurbs, or research proposals could
potentially be in your results list. They are usually short (from 1/3
of a page to 3 pages) and have brief, non-descriptive titles. For
example, although this is from a results list that is limited to
scholarly journals, it's not an article (it's a book review):
This IS a scholarly article from the same results list:
Be sure to click on the title of the article because there will be an abstract, or summary, of the article. This abstract can really help you determine whether or not the article will be relevant to your topic.
The catalog and the article databases do not recognize phrase searching. For example, if your topic is the role that music plays in Yoruba culture, you won't get any results (or very few) if you type in "the role that music plays in Yoruba culture." You need to break your topic into keywords or concepts and connect them with the word AND. So a good search for that topic would be "music AND Yoruba AND culture."
Keep in mind that there may be alternate spellings of words; try searching both or all versions. For example, the British spelling of the word "defense" is "defence." Also, languages that have been transliterated into the Roman alphabet frequently have multiple spellings.
Lastly, try to think of as many different words or ways to describe your topic as possible. As you skim article abstracts or book tables of contents, look for the other terms people use to talk about your topic. Use these in your searches.
Doing research can be challenging and time-consuming--don't give up easily! It's worth spending more time at the beginning to get good articles rather than scrambling at the end and risking a poor grade. If you are really having trouble, please contact me.