MLA International Bibliography

Introduction
The MLA International Bibliography indexes books, articles and dissertations published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics, providing coverage from 1926 to the present. It includes the MLA Thesaurus and the MLA Directory of Periodicals, which lists detailed information on over 5,500 journals, including over 4,400 indexed in MLA Bibliography.

To find it, click on "Databases" on the library’s home page, then click on "Gale." You will come to a menu of Gale databases. At the bottom of the list you will find Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography. Click there.

Because MLA International Bibliography is part of Gale, you will notice that all of the screens look similar to the screens you saw in the chapters on Gale and Literature Resource Center.

Basic Search

The first screen you see when you come into MLA International Bibliography is the Basic Search. You can search for words in: Keywords, Full Citation, Name of Work, or Person-About.

You can limit your search to peer-reviewed publications, by publication date, publication title, language, or document type.

For now, we will do a search on Hemingway Ernest without limiting our results. As with the Literature Resource Center, JSTOR, and Project Muse, the order of the first and last name is not important. You may search for either Ernest Hemingway or Hemingway Ernest and you will have the same results. Also, punctuation is not important. You do not need to capitalize either the first or last name, and you do not need to separate the names with a comma.

Search Results

Here we see a list of article results. Results are shown 20 at a time. At the head of the results list you see two arrows. The first arrow takes you to the next group of 20 results. The second arrow will take you to the end of the list.

Take a look at the first article. For this article, first see the article title, highlighted and underlined in blue. Next to it, you see the author of the article. Underneath, the title of the journal, volume & issue number of the journal, date, and pages. In addition, we also find a list of Subject Terms for the article. These include: American Literature; 1900-1999, Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961), Fiction, and Food Imagery.

Citation

Here we find all of the bibliographic information that we previously saw on the search results screen, as well as the Subject Terms. Additional information includes the MLA Update, MLA Sequence Number,  MLA Record Number, and the Gale Record Number. These numbers are meaningless to you. We are looking for a full-text article, but there is not one here. There is no link to the article. What you see is all there is.

MLA Citation
At the bottom of the article reference above, you see a sample citation in close MLA style. Do not use this citation! One reason not to use this citation is that it is not acceptable to cite an article for your research paper unless you have a copy of the article and have used it in the paper. You may, however, borrow the article on interlibrary loan and then of course you could cite the article.

Another reason not to use the above citation is that the citation contains a few differences from the approved format used by the English Department at VWCC. One difference is that in the citation above there is no hanging indent. With a hanging indent the second line should be indented 5 spaces. Here is the correct citation to the above article.

Meyers, Jeffrey. "Hemingway's Feasts." Papers on Language and Literature 43.4 (2007): 426-42.

Notice that in the citation above we do not cite a database, a database vendor, the college & library, the web address, or the date of access. This is because we are citing the hard copy rather than the electronic form.

Interlibrary Loan
While MLA International Bibliography does not provide very many full-text articles, it is still a very useful database. In fact, no comprehensive review of the literature would be complete without it. As an index database, MLA points you to the literature and then you have to find it from there. You can find it! Any article not available full-text or on the shelves at Brown Library can be obtained for you from a library that does own it. This service is called interlibrary loan. For more information, please visit the library home page and click on the Interlibrary Loan link.

Subject Guide Search

Above you see the Subject Guide Search. This search is more specific than the Basic Search we did earlier. With the Basic Search we could find our topic words in  Keywords, Full Citation, Name of Work, or Person-About. With the Subject Guide Search we are looking for our topic words only in Subject terms. Each record in the database is assigned Subject terms. These terms help identify what the article is about. It is not enough for the words to be in the article citation, the article actually has to be about your topic.

Underneath the Subject Guide Search box you see the same options to limit your search that you had with the Basic Search. Let's ignore those for now and click Search.

On the screen above you see the results for our Subject Guide Search. These are all Subject Terms that include the words Ernest Hemingway. There are five different Subject Terms. The one we are looking for is Hemingway, Ernest, with 4,005 results. Notice that the order of the words for our search was not important.

Remember that we found 4,028 results when we did the Basic Search earlier. As you can see, the Subject Guide search reduced our results slightly. In this case there isn't a big difference between one search and the other, but sometimes changing your search from Basic to Subject can be very useful.