WRIT 106: Narrative Theory

Note:

• On each page of the tutorial, wait for the prompt before moving to the next page.
• When prompted to open up a database on the final page, use Wellesley's SuperSearch or one of the databases on the home page of this guide.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike by The WI+RE Team 2020, UCLA Library.

Many databases allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed articles. Learn about peer review in this short video (from the University of Kansas Libraries).

Use quotation marks " " to search words as a phrase. This will narrow your results.

"narrative theory"

Use AND to combine multiple concepts in your search. This will narrow your results.

"narrative theory" AND feminism

Use OR to find different ways your topic could be expressed. This will expand your results. Group these related terms in parentheses, so the database interprets them first. The following search will find results that have any one of the terms in parentheses as well as the phrase "narrative theory." 

"narrative theory" AND (feminism OR gender)

Use an asterisk * to find variant endings. This will expand your results. In the example below, feminis* will find feminism and feminist, and gender* will find gender, gendered, gendering, etc.

("narrative theory" OR "narrative technique") AND (feminis* OR gender*)

• MLA International Bibliography searches a relatively small amount of information about each source (such as a citation and subject terms), rather than the full text of the source itself.
• This can be very helpful for finding relevant sources, since it means the results that come up are likely to be about the ideas you're searching, rather than just contain your search terms somewhere in the article or book.
• It also means the specific terms you choose become more important. Trying a variety of keywords is especially important to getting good results in MLA.
• Look at the Subjects that come up under each citation. They will give you additional ideas for search terms to try.

To focus a search in LION, you can use the drop-down menu to search for a term in certain fields, such as SUBJECT.

• A search for august wilson "Anywhere" will find results that have august wilson anywhere in the text, even ad a passing mention.
• A search for august wilson in the SUBECT field will show you only results in which August Wilson is a substantial focus of each article or book.
• Using MAINSUBJECT will show you only results in which August Wilson is the main focus of each result.
• If you don't get many results using SUBJECT or MAINSUBJECT, try NOFT, which searches everywhere except in the full text of the article or book.