Film

When searching for articles about your films, keep it simple:

1. Enclose names and phrases in quotations marks (capitalization is unnecessary):
2. First Text box: "frank capra" AND/OR "it's a wonderful life"
3. Second Text box: criticism OR interpretation
4. After hitting search: Limit to Academic Journals, Ebooks and Books
5. Look for the list of recommended film journal titles (seen to the right here) within your search results.

What if I am not finding anything?

• Remove the search terms criticism OR interpretation and search for the title and/or director name in the abstract field using the dropdown box (AB Abstract).  Limit to Academic Journals, Ebooks and Books
• Expand the search to look for the director name and film title within the full text of the articles (TX All Text).  Limit to Academic Journals, Ebooks, and Books
• Search Ebook Central for an ebook - search with the director name and film title in quotation marks.

When searching for articles on themes or topics related to your films of study, do a keyword search:

1. Enclose phrases in quotations marks (capitalization is unnecessary):
2. First Text box: keyword or phrase
3. Second Text box: additional keyword or phrase
4. After hitting search: Limit to Academic Journals

What if I am not finding anything or too many irrelevant results?

• Too little: Expand your search results to include books and eBooks.
• Too many: using the drop-down boxes next to your search boxes, search for your keywords and phrases in the abstract (AB), subject terms (SU), or article titles (TI).

Within Discovery Search (or any other database), you can choose to view (click Cite) or print/email/save the recommended MLA formatted citation for an article. If you do so, you will need to make a few changes to the citation text for accuracy.

1.  Change Ebscohost to the name of the database that your article came from directly as seen in the article record in Discovery Search.

2.  Check to make sure that all text is capitalized properly and portions are not in ALL CAPS.

3.  Check to make sure that article titles are in quotation marks and in Title Case (All First Letters in Words are Capitalized Except for Minor Words).  Check to make sure that journal and database titles are in Title Case and in italics.

4.  When you copy and paste the citation into a Word or Google doc, you will have to add double spacing, change to 12 point font, and format the hanging indention. 

To view accurate examples of MLA formatted citations, view the link provided below.