Young Adult Literature presents a particular difficulty for finding secondary research sources. Secondary Sources are things like academic articles, journal articles, reviews, blog posts, news coverage, etc-- over a particular work or piece of media within the genre. Because of the frequency of YA novels now being published, and a wider availability of publishing houses-- not every novel or story has an expansive library of critically written/reviewed sources. You might find that your chosen novel does not have much literature available when searching for sources. If you run into this issue, consider the following steps:
- Search the entire library's catalog for articles, not just specific databases.
- This can be done by typing the novel's title, author, or related keyword search terms into the front search bar of the library's website. This searches through all of the library's databases.
- Click on "see more" under "articles" or "books and media" to see results.
- What if there are no sources for my topic/novel?
- Search up keyword terms surrounding the themes you wish to explore with your novel, perhaps in correlation with the author, or the genre within which the author is writing. You can then use these points of view to either support your thesis, or speak to naysayers that you might be addressing.
- try searching something along the lines of "[literary theme] in [author's last name] or [genre] or [title] "
- What if I am still having trouble?
- Consider searching outside guides such as Google Scholar, then back searching on the library's website, or requesting a title from Inter Library Loan.
- See this guide for more information on keyword searching
- reach out to your subject librarian!
- Example:
- Fire Keeper's Daughter
- Things I might type in to the search bar: postcolonial narratives, coming of age stories, indigenous coming of age, gender roles, tribal customs
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