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English Literature: researching your dissertation: Finding relevant books

A guide for English Literature students doing their Dissertation (module EN3DIS). Information on finding books, articles and primary sources and links to search tools and resources.

Finding books and e-books on your dissertation topic

  • Use Enterprise to search for specific books you've discovered elsewhere or to find what books are available on your chosen topic.
  • Use simple keyword searches to find titles with relevant vocabulary, and use the subject headings from any relevant books to discover related content.
  • Filter a large number of results using the options on the left hand side of the screen. 

The Library website provides tips on searching for books on a topic and on Looking at your Enterprise search results.

If you discover a book that isn't availble in the Library, contact your Academic Liaison Librarian to request we purchase it, or get a quick temporary loan from another Library using the Inter-library loans service (more information below.)

Start here with a keyword search in Enterprise

To make use of subject headings to widen your search results, either search Enterprise for books on a particular topic, or search for a book which you have already found that is relevant to your subject. Then use the hyperlinked subject terms listed within the record for the item on Enterprise, to either narrow or widen your search results.
 
In this example, searching Enterprise for 'first world war poetry' brings up 24 items on the catalogue. By selecting the subject term "World War, 1914-1918 -- Poetry" in the record of a relevant title, provides a list of 81 items relevant to this subject.
Subject headings in Enterprise Library catalogue book information
 
 
Using synonyms
Also make use of synonyms when searching Enterprise, Summon or any other bibliographic database. For example, you may get a wider range of results if you search for 'Victorian' OR '19th Century' or 'nineteenth century' than just using one of these terms.

Finding books beyond UoR

You may want to discover what books are published on your topic beyond the collection here at Reading. You can do that by searching these union catalogues for your topic - they search library collections in the UK and Worldwide to help you discover useful titles to request from your Academic Liaison Librarian or via inter-library loan. 

Video guides to literature searching

Watch this short playlist of two videos for an introduction to literature searching and the techniques to use.

If you are unable to view these videos on YouTube they are also available on YuJa or Stream (University username and password required):

Getting books not held at Reading

Map of the south of the UKOur Inter-Library Loans service can get articles, books and other publications not held at Reading from other libraries (usually from the British Library).

For more information see our webpages: