How to Find English Literature Journal Abstracts Using Google Scholar

Scholarly journals can be found on the Internet.

Now that most scholarly journals have become digitized, you no longer need to scour the collections of university libraries to find journal abstracts related to your area of research. English literature journals such as Critical Inquiry, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Modern Language Quarterly, Feminist Studies and Studies in the Novel all make their abstracts freely available to researchers via the Internet. The key is to locate the best available search method. Launched in November 2004, Google Scholar is one of the more accessible means of searching for academic journal abstracts. According to Google Scholar lead engineer Anurag Acharya, the eventual goal is to be a place you can go to locate all scholarly literature ever published.

Things You'll Need

• Computer with Internet access

Instructions

1. Go to scholar.google.com.

2. Uncheck the box that reads, "include patents," as this is an option intended for researchers in the legal and scientific fields.

3. Enter the subject you are researching in the "Search" field.

4. Press "Search," and on the next page, a selection of books and scholarly article abstracts will appear.

Tips & Warnings

• Try to be as specific as possible when you are doing your search. For instance, if you are interested in researching gender and sexuality in Jane Austen's novels, you will yield more specific results by entering "gender and sexuality in Jane Austen's novels" in the "Search" field, rather than merely "Jane Austen."

• Abstracts from journals are generally free and easy to access, but the articles themselves are usually not free. While there might be a one- or two-page preview of the article, you will generally have to pay if you want to read the entire article.

References

• Google Scholar
• Google Librarian Central: An Interview wWth Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar Lead Engineer