Research skills: Literature search: How to find journal articles

Using a printed index

If you want to do serious research into a French literature topic you'll need to use a specialised index. So far, these exist only in printed format, but they are excellent resources because they are devoted just to French literature, whereas databases such as MLA cover a wide range of literatures, of which French is a relatively small part.

The most important indexes are: French XX; Bibliographie de la littérature française du Moyen Age à nos jours; Bibliographie der franzosischen Literaturwissenschaft; and French 17: An annual descriptive bibliography of French seventeenth century studies

On the following pages I've prepared a sequence of images that will show you how to use a printed index to search for journal articles (and other critical works), using the excellent French XX index as an example.
You'll find that the search techniques I describe are fairly easy to apply to other printed indexes.

Note that not every article you find by using an index will be available to you in the Barr Smith Library's collections; you'll need to check the Library Catalogue to see whether this Library has a copy of the journal you need.

I'm concerned here to show you search techniques; it's up to you to select which journal articles you want to follow up and find in the Library's collections.

Remember: click anywhere on the images on the following pages, or on the arrow button, to go to the next page.

Click when you are ready to begin a demonstration of how to use the French XX index to find journal articles.