Collins Memorial Library: French & Francophone Studies: Articles

How to Search for French Language Material in Databases

Depending on the database, there are a few strategies to find resources written in French:

You can:

conduct your search in English and then, once you have a list of results, click on the Search Options and then from the Language list, select French.
search using French search terms.
locate the Thesaurus or Subject Terms and appropriate French terms.

Be aware of databases that auto correct French words to similar English words.

MLA International Bibliography

MLA International Bibliography This link opens in a new window
The key database for identifying scholarly books, essays, articles, and dissertations on modern literature in all languages. Also covers cultural studies, folklore, film studies, and linguistics.

MLA International Bibliography Tutorial

Literature Criticism

Gale Literature Criticism includes overviews as well as excerpts from articles, books, and essays written by scholars and full-text literary criticism. It is a very useful tool for discerning key trends in scholarly interpretation. Use this database to find reviews and scholarly treatments of French and Francophone authors, works, periods, and themes. Each record includes full bibliographic information so that you can track down the original sources.

Literature Criticism
Includes overviews by topic, author, and work, as well as excerpts from articles, books, and essays written by scholars.

Featured Journals

E-Journal Collections

These e-journal collections provide access to many journals in French Studies, but they are more limited in scope and coverage compared to a subject database like the MLA International Bibliography. In most cases, it's better to search subject databases to identify articles, and then search the journal title in Primo to link to the materials in these e-journal collections. However, if you are doing interdisciplinary research, JSTOR and Project Muse can be excellent databases to search because of their multidisciplinary focus.

JSTOR
An interdisciplinary journal archive. It includes archives of over one thousand leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. Includes the Artstor image collections.
Project MUSE
Interdisciplinary database includes books and articles from scholarly publishers with focus on humanities and social science.

Databases for Historical & Cultural Scholarship

Depending on your needs, you may also wish to explore some of these databases.

Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Indexes articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations on all aspects of world history from 1450 to the present. Does not include United States and Canadian history, which is covered in America: History and Life.
Humanities Abstracts
Covers topics including art, classical studies, dance, film, journalism, philosophy, religion and much more. Content includes feature articles, interviews, obituaries and original works of fiction, drama, poetry and reviews.
FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals
Contains article citations from academic and popular film journals. Also included is The Treasures from the Film Archives dataset; a database containing credits and information about the silent-era film holdings of archives from around the world, and a full text set of key reference volumes such as the Oxford History of World Cinema (OUP, 1997) and Film Analysis: A Norton Reader (Norton, 2005).
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences. The database covers all aspects of the study of language including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.

Persée: Portail de revues scientifiques en sciences humaines et sociales
Provides full-text access to the back files of French journals in the social and human sciences.

Tipasa: Interlibrary Loan

If your article is not available at Collins Library, you've got another option for getting it. Use Tipasa, our interlibrary loan service.

Tipasa is linked to your library account so you'll need to log in to use it.

Once you are logged in, either go directly to Tipasa and manually enter the information, or, if you're using a database, look for a shortcut link to automatically fill out the form:

Allow at least a week for the article to come. If your article is delivered in electronic format, you'll receive an email with a link to follow as soon as it's arrived.