The author, a Library and Information Sciences Graduate Student, published this guide during her Professional Field Experience with James P. Adams Library's Reference Department
- This guide's database recommendations and overviews derive from a Comparative Performance Study of Bibliographic Databases conducted by the author
- The Performance Study was completed with the aim of uncovering each literary database's strengths, weaknesses, and ability to fulfill the informational needs that appear in common literary queries
- There were four literary test queries involved during the performance evaluation:
- Student needs critical articles on Frankenstein (the novel) published within the last 40 years
- Student needs critical articles on Frankenstein and feminism published within the last 40 years
- Student needs to find articles about Frankenstein in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Student needs to find critical articles about the novels of Elena Ferrante in Italian and English
- The four literary test queries represent common literary research needs:
- The need to find critical articles
- The completion of a literature review
- The need to find articles in a specific journal
- The search for criticism of multilingual texts
- This guide's recommendations are based on the evaluation of each database's ease of use, the relevance and analysis of results, and the overall performance in regard to the test queries
