Guidelines for Using the MLA International Bibliography

At first glance, the MLA International Bibliography looks like any other database you may have used. Unfortunately, looks can be deceiving. This bibliography is structured and maintained differently from other indexes and accordingly requires different search strategies. You will discover that you may need to run several searches to find all of the citations to scholarly literature on your topic. The following guidelines are intended to help you structure successful searches.

Key Guidelines

• Always use the Advanced Search page
• Try to include an author's name in every search
• Understand that search results are arranged by date of publication (most recent first), not relevance. There is an option to sort by relevance, but it isn't terribly sophisticated.

Searching by Author

• Authors (of literary works) are the most comprehensively indexed elements in the MLA.
• If the author also wrote under a pseudonym, search by the pseudonym IN ADDITION to the real name.
• If the author's name can be found with different spellings, run searches with all spellings of the name.

Searching by Title of Literary Work

• Always include an author name in the search.
• Books and articles indexed before 1980 do not include titles of literary works in their list of descriptors. Also, books or articles that discuss more than two literary works do not include any of these titles in their list of descriptors. This means that some citations may, in fact, be useful for your research even if the descriptors do not actually list the title of the literary work you are analyzing.
• If the literary work was written in a foreign language, search by BOTH the title in the original language and the title in English translation. Be aware of English titles that are not literal translations of the original. For example, Ana Matute's novel is entitled Primera memoria in the original Spanish, but has been published in English translation under two different titles, Awakening and School of the Sun. For this novel, you would need to include all three titles in your search.

Searching by Theme or Concept

• The MLA does not use a thesaurus, or controlled vocabulary, to the same extent that most other databases do. As a result, when you search by concept, try to think of as many synonyms and related terms as possible for your concept and then run searches using all of those terms. For example, if you are interested in the treatment of women in a specific author's work, you might run one search with the author's name and the word "women," and then substitute "woman," "female," "feminist," "feminism," and "gender" for "women" in additional searches.
• Use the shortest term possible because many MLA descriptors overlap. For example, use "African-American" instead of "African-American writers" or "African-American literature."

Searching by Genre

• It is often useful to combine an author's name with a genre term. These kinds of searches often pick up citations that are missed with combined author name/literary work title searches.
• Use both the singular and plural of the genre in your search. For example, use both "short story" and "short stories."

Searching by Time Period

• It is possible to search by time period, but not recommended. The time periods used in MLA indexing are in one hundred year increments, i.e., 1800-1899.
• Instead of using dates, try searching by the name of a period ("Victorian") or literary movement ("Acmeism" or "Acmeists").