Searching for criticism of a specific work is often as simple as searching the name of the work (perhaps combined with the author or artist's last name)
Too many results? You can tighten up your search by surrounding phrases with quotation marks to force an exact phrase search:
There may not be research published on specific short stories, poems, or paintings, in which case you will need to rely on broader criticism of the author or artist.
Searching by author or artist as a keyword will catch works BY that author in addition to ABOUT that author.
The advanced search screen in our main discovery system (along with our library catalog and most of our databases) allows you to restrict your search terms to specific parts of the catalog record: the author, title, subject, etc. Allows for far more precision.
Be creative with terminology for specific themes. In addition to synonyms, also try broadening or narrowing the scope of your theme (e.g.. "parent" instead of "father")
Search word stems using an asterisk (*) Works in MOST of our databases
Pay attention to how relevant titles have been cataloged. Items caught using a name search may have a related subject heading. In our catalog and many other databases, those subjects are linked and run new searches.
The subject headings used in our library catalog (based on Library of Congress subject terminology) have some common formats: "[topic] in [genre]" So while keyword searches are the best starting point, consider running subject searches for things like these:
Getting huge result sets? Try a more precise search -- specific phrases, additional search terms, etc. Or if you find few results, make your search less restrictive, and eliminate (or broaden scope of) search terms. It may take several rounds, and may require searching multiple databases. Don't get discouraged! Remember that you are the ultimate filter as you review your search results.
If a relevant section of a document cites other authors -- search our catalog to see if we own those earlier items.
You can also track a particular item forward, following the so-called scholarly conversation through subsequent research. There are several databases - including Google Scholar - that offer this feature. Look for links labelled "CITED BY".