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Research Guides

LING/ANTH 433, LING 533: Sociolinguistics II: Search the Literature

Library resources and research in sociolinguistics for LING/ANTH 433 & LING 533

Bibliographic Databases

Start your research with a linguistics database, but do not stop there. Literature from other disciplines may touch on sociolinguistic topics, but may not be indexed in a linguistics database because it is in a publication in a different discipline. For example, research from folklore publications indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, or language policy publications indexed Education Source, could easily be missed by limiting your search to the linguistics literature. Try these databases to find more literature from other disciplines.

Searching the Literature with Databases

Bibliographic databases serve as entry points into scientific and scholarly literature, providing references to articles, books, book chapters, book reviews, and other content. These databases are designed to provide access points to scholarly literature and are especially useful to beginners not steeped in the disciplinary literature, providing metadata, search, and filtering options that allow easy scoping of searches.

Search databases to identify articles, book reviews, books, and other resources relevant to a topic. A few reasons:

  • Databases are often discipline-based, making results more focused and putting search results in context. For example, searching a linguistics database for "morphology" will result in articles about the form of words, rather than the form of living organisms (biology), land forms (geology), etc.
  • Advanced search and filter features allow precise, sophisticated searching as well as the ability to easily narrow and broaden search results.
  • Content is curated and more authoritative than information found on the open web.
  • Often include direct links to full text.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a search engine rather than a database. While it lacks the nuanced search options of scholarly databases, Google Scholar provides a powerful tool allowing effective keyword searching by author name, article title, specific phrase in full text, etc. across a broad range of scholarly literature. Use it for known-item searching, its "Cited By" feature indicating impact, author profiles with comprehensive publication lists, and keyword searching on full-text.