ATH 4000: Home

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.

Please don't hesitate to ask me for help! That is what I'm here for. Email me or contact me via the chat bubble on the right to set up a meeting time and I'll be happy to assist you.

You can find books in catalogs and databases, and we have tried to make finding books as easy as possible for you as you work on your research! The Wright State and OhioLink Catalogs are now combined so you can search both catalogs at once for what you need. 

To only search for books (both physical copies and e-books) you must select "Resource Type" on the side of the page and select "Books" (As you can see, you can use this option to narrow your search to many kinds of resources).

 

The books displayed in the search results can be found in multiple different places, whether that be physically or electronically. You can check where to find them under the item details. If a book says it is "Available Online," that should be an e-book you can immediately access. If it says "Check for Available Services," that is most likely a book that will need to be requested through Interlibrary Loan. If it says, "Available at Dunbar Library Circulating Collection," that means we physically have a copy on our shelves.

 

If you only want to see what books are physically on the shelves at the Dunbar Library before looking into OhioLink, you can do that by going to the drop-down menu to the side of the search bar and selecting "Library Catalog." Every one of the books listed here is on the library shelves and can be immediately checked out as long as no one else has it already. 

When using the drop-down menu, you will notice a few other options that are explained below:

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:

or 

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:

1. When you get to JSTOR's main page, click the "Advanced Search" link above the search box.
2. On the search page, type in your keywords and then scroll down to check the boxes next to Anthropology & Archaeology or any others that look good to you, e.g., Asian Studies.
3. The default sort for the results list in JSTOR is relevance, so be sure to check that you don't use an article from 1895.  You can change the sort by clicking on the drop-down menu.

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.