Wednesday, February 5th, 2014
Getting Sources for your Discussions
Go to the library’s website:
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/library/
Using secondary sources can be incredibly helpful in stimulating your ideas and providing counter-arguments. They also provide a good way to focus on moving away from plot summary to a more analytic and argument-based paper. And finally you will have to use an article for your presentation assignment.
Under the “Articles” tab in the search bar, click databases “By Name” in order to search for specific databases rather than specific journals (searching by database will yield a far greater number of results). This will bring you to a list of databases. Click on “J” for instance and this will bring you to a list of databases that begin with J which is where the database JSTOR is located. There are other very useful options besides JSTOR, such as “Academic Search Complete” and “Project Muse” also listed under these sets of databases, and I encourage you to utilize any or all of these databases. Once you click on your database you will need to enter your Baruch ID and password to gain access to the site.
JSTOR, as well as the other databases, collect articles from a huge variety of journals covering an expansive amount of time – so anything you search will probably yield a lot of results. Once you are in the JSTOR site, searching for specific things is always helpful – for instance “The Oresteia AND justice” or “Odysseus AND fate.” This will still yield a lot of results, but you can sift through the articles and find something relevant to your topic. You will gain access to the full article so you can print a PDF version. All the necessary citation information will be on the article’s title page, including the name of the journal and the date of publication.
Citing journal articles:
Unlike websites such as sparknotes, these are accredited and published journals and therefore legitimate sources. In other words these articles were reviewed, edited and then published in a circulating print journal. You can consult the website I will give you about how to cite journal articles, but here are examples as a guide. Each citation includes (in this order) the author’s name, the title of their article, the title of the journal in which this article was published, the volume and number of the journal, its year of publication and the page numbers of the article. Be sure to format in this style (known as MLA):
Levin, Susan M. “Subtle Fire: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Prose and Poetry.”
The Massachusetts Review 21.2 (1980): 345-363.
Ehnnen, Jill. “Writing against, Writing through: Subjectivity, Vocation, and Authorship
in the Work of Dorothy Wordsworth.” South Atlantic Review 64.1 (1999): 72-90.