LitFinder by Gale
For students doing literary research, recommend LitFinder. This is a powerful, but very user-friendly, cross-search database that supports all types of literature research. Students can access works from over 80,000 authors from 660 nationalities. This resource includes information such as biographies, glossaries, images and more than 150,000 full-text poems as well as short stories, speeches and plays.
Students can easily find information using various refined search and limiter options or just browse through the database.
- With the Person Search, students can quickly retrieve information on a particular writer or identify authors linked by qualities such as gender, nationality, century and genre.
- A Works Search provides similar limiters and lets students browse works by thousands of subjects, themes and movements.
Two other unique tools are the Topic Finder and Term Frequency. From the Home Page, scroll down to the bottom of the page. (These tools are also available as tools on the Search Results sidebar.)
- Topic Finder: This is a graphical way of displaying the context of terms which can lead to connections students might not have otherwise considered. This search tool generates a visual representation of the results by topic and subtopic and gives two different visualizations – tiles or wheel.
- Term Frequency: This shows the trend of one or more terms over time. This tool generates an interactive graph based on the presence of search terms found in the collections the student is searching. Students can specify a range of publication years and select which Content Types to search. They can then use the graph to retrieve search results by clicking on the graph point.
More tools offered by LitFinder:
Once a topic is selected, the following tools become available in the Tool Box:
- Citation Tools – MLA, APA and Chicago style citations are supported. Formatted citations can easily be imported to services like EasyBib or NoodleTools.
- Highlights and Notes
- Send to Google Drive or OneDrive
- Print or email
- Save, share, or download
- Translate
This is a very comprehensive database for students doing literary research with easy-to-use search paths.
Lisa DeLucia, Upper St. Clair Library