OneSearch is a tool that will find books, eBooks, academic articles, news articles, videos, and other sources appropriate for your research.

You may need to run multiple searches to find good sources.

Let's say I want to consider the role of fate in Tess of the d'Ubervilles; I'd consider running a search like this to include the title of the work as well as the word fate and use an asterisk to return any relevant derivatives (e.g. fatalism, fatalistic):

• "Tess of the d'Ubervilles" (fate or fatalis​*)

If you are researching a source about which not much has been written, you may need to try broad, simple searches.

For example, if I wanted to explore Tolstoy's use of literature as a means to explore human spirituality towards enlightenment, I'd try to use the following keywords from that prompt:  Tolstoy, spirit*, enlightenment.

If you try a broad search and get a lot of results, try adding the word criticism to your search to get sources that analyze the work.

For example, "Tess of the d'Ubervilles" criticism.

DATABASE: Gale eBooks

• Find background information from general and subject encyclopedias.  This source can also be useful for finding biographical information on certain authors.

DATABASE: Literary Reference Center Plus

Here are a few things to keep in mind when using this database: 

• Use simple searches
• Limit your search to Full Text
• Your results may include a Work Analysis or Literary Criticism:
  • A Work Analysis is, generally, a brief critical overview of a work. 
  • A Literature Criticism is a work that originated from a scholarly source, is written by published literary experts and will provide more in-depth, academic discussion of the work.

RESOURCE: Google Scholar (via the Los Rios library catalog)

Here are a few things to keep in mind when using this resource: 

• Start broad and then add relevant keywords like this:  "Annabel Lee" (death or desire).
• Links to full text, including links to Los Rios-subscribed content, are displayed to the right of the search result entry.