LibGuides: Linguistics: Literature Search

Literature Searches

The goal of a literature search is to find and summarize the current knowledge for a particular topic including substantive findings, theories, and methodologies. Literature searches involve scholarly secondary sources like journal articles, book chapters, and books.

Finding Journal Articles

Databases allow you to search the contents of journals to identify articles on your topic. Some databases contain or link to the full text of journal articles. If the full text is not available from the database, check the library catalog to see if Reed subscribes to the journal and has the particular issue you're looking for. If the article you are looking for is not available at Reed, you can request it through interlibrary loan.

Best Bet:

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) This link opens in a new window
Index to international literature in linguistics with some full text covering all aspects of the study of language. Over 1500 journals are indexed along with books, book chapters, and dissertations.

Additional Databases:

Communication Source This link opens in a new window
Articles on mass media, communications theory, linguistics, organizational communication, phonetics and speech pathology.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text archive of selected core scholarly journals in various disciplines. All parts of the journals are scanned, including any images.
MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
The major index of literary, linguistic and folklore scholarship. Covers all languages and literatures except classical Greek and Latin.
Periodicals Index Online This link opens in a new window
Includes citations to articles in more than 4,600 scholarly journals in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Social Sciences Abstracts (1983 - Present) This link opens in a new window
Articles from major English language journals in the social sciences.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
A replacement for Web of Science, Scopus indexes content from 24,600 active titles and 5,000 publishers which is rigorously vetted and selected by an independent review board, and uses a rich underlying metadata architecture to connect people, published ideas and institutions.

Finding Review Articles & Bibliographies

Review publications contain articles that review the research literature already done in a given area. A review article can give you a good up-to-date synthesis of a particular topic and provide you with an extensive bibliography.

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics reviews recent research in key areas of the broad field of applied linguistics. Each issue is thematic, covering the topic by means of research summaries and critical overviews.
Annual Review of Linguistics
The Annual Review of Linguistics, in publication since 2015, covers significant developments in the field of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces.
Language and Linguistics Compass
A journal that publishes literature reviews of current scholarship in language and linguistics.
Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics
Peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on linguistics topics and languages.

Oxford Handbooks Online - Linguistics 2009 - 2023 This link opens in a new window
Oxford Handbooks Online is a series of handbooks of review essays written by leading scholars in different subject areas. Each handbook takes an aspect of its discipline and unpacks it, explaining the key issues, the classic and contemporary debates on those issues, and setting the agenda for how those debates might evolve.

Finding Books

Use the library catalog to search for print books and ebooks from Reed's collection. You can also search the print holdings of other local libraries (via Summit).

Reed College used the Library of Congress (LC) Classification system to arrange the books in the stacks. The letter P is used to organize general linguistics materials (P1-1091). The Ps are located in the Library Lower Level 1 East Stacks. Below are some suggested areas for browsing the stacks.

LC Call Number Range	Description
P 35-35.5	Linguistic Anthropology
P 37-37.5 and BF 455-463	Psycholinguistics
P 40-40.5	Sociolinguistics
P 61-81	Historical linguistics
P 87-96	Media Studies
P 98-98.5	Computational linguistics
P 99-99.4	Semiotics & Pragmatics
P 118-118.75	Language acquisition
P 126-128	Methodology & Analysis
P 211-240	Phonology and Phonetics
P 241-259	Morphology
P 291-298	Syntax
P 325-325.5	Semantics