Writing 50
Authenticity and Contemporary Memoir
Spring 2006

“Everyone's memory is tricky and mine's a little trickier than most.”
—Lillian Hellman

Finding Articles in Journals and Magazines ( Use the Proxy Server for off-campus access to these and other databases.)

Use an article index or database to find articles in scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers. Below are three indexes that are a good place to start, but there are dozens of others that would also be useful for this assignment, depending on which angle you take in your paper. The complete list of indexes available at UCSB is at www.library.ucsb.edu/databases.

• MLA
• EXPANDED ACADEMIC
• JSTOR

MLA

• Major resource for literary studies. Includes citations (not full text) to books and articles on modern languages, literatures, linguistics, folklore, and related topics. Worldwide coverage.
• Finds articles and book chapters on a particular topic.
• MLA does not include full text. However, the UC system may provide full text of an article through another means, which you can access by clicking the orange .
• Make sure the dropdown boxes have been changed to either "Descriptors" or "Anywhere", then enter your search terms. Example:
• In the first row of boxes, type "memoirs, autobiography". There are countless ways to design your search, but here's one example.

• Follow the to track down the article, either online or in print format.
• To find the print copy of a journal article, look up the journal title in Pegasus or Melvyl and note the call number.
• Remember: Pegasus and Melvyl will only tell you what journals the library subscribes to; they will not tell you anything about the articles within a journal.
• Email, print or save options are toward the top of the page.
• For items published before 1963, check the print version of MLA (in Main Ref Z7006 .M6)

Expanded Academic

• This is a general index, unlike most of the others that focus on a particular discipline.
• Includes both scholarly and popular articles.
• If you want to limit your results to articles from scholarly journals, check the box labeled peer-reviewed publications .
• Type your keywords (e.g. fact and fiction and memoir*) in the search box.
• Most databases accept a truncation symbol, most often a *. Useful for plural or to catch variations of a word; for example, crit*
• Some of the citations will have a link to the full text online. Just click the article title (or the notebook page icon) for access
• If the full text is not available in Expanded Academic, click to link to the Melvyl catalog. Melvyl will show you the call number for the journal at UCSB, or…
• In some cases, the link will connect you to the full text of the article if the UC system has access to it through another means.
• Use the icons along the top of the page to email, print, or download citations (or the whole article if it’s available), and to start a new search.
  
  

JSTOR

• This is an archival collection of journals from all disciplines, back to a journal's first issue.
• All results are full-text.
• From the Advanced Search page, enter your search terms.
• Example: "truth in autobiography"
• Check the box labelled "Article" at the bottom of the page.
• You cannot email from JSTOR, but you can print or download the articles. First open the article, then follow the instructions at the top of the page.

Finding Books and Book Chapters

• Pegasus is the online catalog at UCSB. Use it to find books and other materials at UCSB
• Melvyl is the online catalog for all the UC libraries.
• If you don't know the exact subject terms for your topic, start with a keyword search. This will look for your words in the title, author name, publisher information, and other parts of the catalog record.
• Keyword searches will scan book chapters, which can be great resources for your paper!
• Subject searches require exact wording, but the results will be much more precise
• The * symbol will pick up alternate endings to a word, so that crit* will find library records that contain the words criticism, critical, critic, critique and so forth.

  Pegasus KEYWORD examples:

  • memoir and crit*
  • handbook technical writing
  • authentic* and memoir
  • rhetoric and memoir*

  Pegasus SUBJECT examples:

  • autobiography african american authors
  • self in literature
  • autobiographical fiction—history and criticism
  • english language—rhetoric—study and teaching—psychological aspects

A few titles that may be of interest:

Internet

• The Internet can be a great source for information, but be careful: the results you get in a typical Google search will probably not be the type of scholarly sources that you need.
• Pay attention to domain names—a website name ending in .edu or .gov may well be more authoritative than a .com or .org, but not necessarily.
• Remember also that quality control doesn't exist on the Web, so you'll need to be especially careful to evaluate what you find.
• A quick checklist:
  1. Is the website authoritative and reliable? How can you tell?
  2. Can you determine who wrote it? Is it somebody's personal page
  3. Is it current and regularly updated, or does that matter?
  4. What is the scope, coverage, and intention of the site? Is it intended to sell, inform, persuade, and explain?
  5. Be sure to give credit to any website you use.

Citation Formats

Here's a citation machine to help you format your citations and bibliography in standard MLA or APA style.

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