English Research Guide

Welcome to the resource guide for English at Montana State University.  This guide provides a variety of resources for students and faculty in English including article databases, journals, and websites. Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Historians make distinctions between what they call primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources are firsthand accounts of people present at an event. In effect, they are witnesses of the event... Secondary sources are based on primary sources. AHA

Primary Sources: these are sources created at the time of what you are studying and are often firsthand accounts. For example, some online and physical collections of primary sources include:

• Montana Memory Project
• Library of Congress Digital Collections 
• Montana State University Library Archives and Special Collections

Secondary Sources: these are analyses created after the event or era you are studying, and often take the form of journal articles, books, or book chapters written by scholars. Some examples include:

• The American Historical Review from the American Historical Association (AHA)
• ISIS: A Journal of the History of Science Society
• The Irish General: Thomas Francis Meagher, a scholarly book by Paul R. Wylie

Tertiary Sources: these are guides or reference sources you can use to navigate towards primary or secondary sources, read as an introduction to a topic, or use to find basic common knowledge about an event. Some examples and entry points to tertiary sources include:

• The Encyclopedia of Empire (2016), published by Wiley, online from Credo Reference
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mexican History and Culture (2018), published by Oxford, online from Oxford Reference
• Wikipedia, an open-collaborative online encyclopedia created and maintained by a community of volunteer editors 

Check out the following databases to  start your search articles useful for the English studies, including:

• Literary Criticism
• Biographies
• Literary Reviews
• Book/Textual Reviews

For a comprehensive list of English-related databases, please visit: https://guides.lib.montana.edu/english

Literary Criticism

: the study of literature through evaluation and interpretation of literary works. Use this list of resources to find articles that focus on exploration of literature through literary criticism.