ENG 381: Women's Food Literature

You can search for articles (including peer-reviewed) and other eresources through the Library's discovery service. Follow the steps below and discover some best practices and tips, like limiting results to full-text and scholarly texts only.

To get started, go the the Library homepage: https://www.mssu.edu/library.

If you are off campus, be sure to click "off-campus searching" first & sign in with your MSSU credentials to gain access to eresources. You cannot access articles if you don't do this first. 

1.  In the middle of the screen, click on the tab Search Everything. This will search through many of the Library's ejournals, ebooks, and databases.

2. Supply your keyword(s). Let's start with searching for the keywords we have always lived in the castle. Click the search icon or hit "enter".

3. You should see a list of articles and ebooks that pertain to your search, though they can be pretty broad. To narrow down your results, you can supply additional terms. Click on Advanced Search.

4. For this example, let's look for a connection with food. (a) Let's start by placing quotation marks around "we have always lived in the castle". This will return results using that exact phrase and not an unrelated article just coincidentally using some of those same words. (b) We will also add the author's name for clarity, which is helpful if the title isn't unique (this may come in handy for titles like Oreo that provide results that are off topic). Finally, let's add some terms that clarify we are looking for an analysis including food. (c) Placing the expander OR will search for articles or ebooks that may use any one of the terms we've listed in this field. You can play around with this - maybe try adding symbolism or gender or feminist theory. Then, click on the Search button.

5. You can narrow your results even further by selecting limiters from under the search box. (a) For this example, we want Full Text as this will only return books and articles that are available in their entirety.

(b) You can also select Scholarly which will limit your results to those from peer-reviewed journals only. Note that selecting Scholarly will only return journal articles and will remove all books from your results, so make sure you have looked through your results first.

There are several other options you can select, depending on what you are looking for. (c) You can select All filters to find more limiters such as format, date of publication, or publisher. 

6. Once you have your results, you can click on a title for a detailed record, citation information, and a PDF or link to the full text. Let's click on the first result - an article called We Have Always Lived in the Mind

7. You can click on PDF or Download to view the entire article. Results from open source journals may require you to click on a URL for access. 

8. Clicking on the quotation mark icon will allow you to see several citation styles that will cite the resource for you (but always double-check!)

9. Clicking on the curved arrow icon will allow you to copy a permalink to the resource. This URL is one that remains unchanged and is therefore preferable for re-locating the resource. Always use this instead of the browser URL for your works cited or to find this book again.