Watch the brief tutorial video from Andrew Davis at University of Mississippi and download a matrix template in Word or Excel format below.

Tip! Keep an eye out for books published by university presses. This is a very good hint that the book is scholarly research appropriate for use in a college-level project.

MLA International Bibliography is a great database for locating scholarly linguistics sources, but it is a primarily an index--meaning, most of the database records are just a description/abstract of the book or article, not the full text.

• For book records, you can check our eBook collections above to see if we have a digital copy available.
• For article records, you can request the full text to be sent to you free via ILL at Request Articles.

Tip! A book review is not a research source. Scholarly journals often publish book reviews, which are likely to pop up in your search results. While these can be helpful for tracking down the actual book to use, do not use the review itself as your source.

Browse our Subject Guides for databases for your topic, or check out the A-Z Databases list for more options.

When choosing databases to use for your research, there are several factors to consider:

• the academic subjects covered (does your topic span outside your discipline?)
• the types of materials included (e.g. scholarly journal articles, professional reports, images of works of art, encyclopedia articles, popular magazine articles)
• the availability of full text of articles
• date range of materials covered

If you have a general topic, and are not sure where to search, it is a good idea to start in Academic Search Complete, which is a general database with some information on almost every topic.

Choosing the right database is one of the most important parts of the research process. If you are not familiar with the databases, ask a librarian for help.

Saving articles that you find in our research databases is trickier than saving articles that you find on the open web. You CANNOT just copy/paste the URL from your browser like you would for a webpage--these URLs are session-specific, and you will not be able to get back to the article by clicking on that link later.

How to save your articles:

• Email the article to yourself (option to attach full text)
• Copy/paste the Permalink (this will be different from the URL in your browser) into an email or document
• If full text is available:
  • Print the article PDF
  • Download the article PDF onto your hard drive, thumb drive, etc.