Key Words Are Key: When conducting literary research, you'll often look for sources using author names and titles of literary works as key words. However, it can also be useful to expand your key words to include genres, literary themes, and theoretical approaches of interest (e.g., feminism, postcolonialism, etc.). This is especially important if you're writing about an author or a topic with a smaller body of existing scholarship.
Start with Google Scholar: As a search engine covering a wide range of scholarship across disciplines, Google Scholar is a great starting point for your research, providing a big picture view of what's out there, as well as links to related items that cite each other. Google Scholar is also useful as a catch-all search to cover your bases after you've checked library databases. If you're seeing the same items across multiple platforms, that's a good sign that you're finding the right things.
Don't Forget Books: Scholarly research in the humanities generally appears in a mix of journal articles and books (sometimes called monographs). Linked on this page, the UofL Libraries Catalog is the best place to start finding books on your topic, including print books and e-books. Some scholarly books are anthologies with individual chapters by different authors. Be sure to look at the table of contents to see if there might be a chapter related to your topic.
