CASA/Humanities Inclusivity Program (Summer 2023)

Faculty and students are encouraged (but not required) to make their scholarship and creative work available through ScholarWorks, the GSU Library's institutional repository. (What's an institutional repository?)

Your professor may have uploaded scholarly articles, creative work, and even conference presentations into ScholarWorks.

You can check to see if any of their materials are available there by clicking the link above, selecting "Authors" under "Browse" and then scrolling to find the professor's name (last name first).

**You can also try searching using their name in the general search box, but this may turn up nonrelevant results in addition to useful results.

This database includes information about dissertations and theses worldwide.

You can look up your professor's dissertation in this database by using Advanced Search, typing in their name (last name first!) and selecting "Author."

You can also look up any dissertations or theses which your professor directed by selecting "Advisor" instead of "Author." This will give you a sense of the graduate research topics they have supported.

(Keep in mind that there may be other professors with the same name or a similar name, so again, look for affiliations and topics that align with your professor's strengths!)

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Most graduate programs now require their graduates to file their thesis or dissertation electronically, usually in the degree-granting school's institutional repository (like, for example, GSU's ScholarWorks). Institutional repositories are searchable via Google, so, if you know the professor's name, you can try searching on their name and including +dissertation in your Google search.

But! Try looking up the professor in the Dissertations and Theses database first, so that you have the dissertation title or at least the degree-granting school -- even if the full dissertation isn't available through that database, it may be available in an institutional repository, and the more information you have, the more effective that search will be.

For example: 

Jill E. Anderson, "The Gay of the Land: Queer Ecology and the Literature of the 1960s" (University of Mississippi, 2011) = NOT Jill the librarian's dissertation...  but Jill the librarian's current research is on girls' literature of the 1950s and 1960s, so, it wouldn't be a huge stretch (and her current research is pretty far removed from her original dissertation, below...  it happens). **Note that this entire dissertation is available in Dissertations & Theses). 

Jill E. Anderson, "'Nothing Done!': The Poet in Early Nineteenth-Century American Culture" (Rutgers, 2000) = Jill the librarian's dissertation (and in Dissertations & Theses, she's listed as 'Jill Elizabeth Anderson') **Note that this entire dissertation is NOT available in Dissertations & Theses -- because it was 2000 and electronic submission wasn't a thing then. But if you Google "jill e. anderson" "nothing done" you'll find this dissertation available in Rutgers' institutional repository, RUcore, here, because I chose to make it available electronically later on. 

To get started with finding articles by a professor that you are researching, start with the Databases by Subject menu on the library's homepage.

• Select the department/discipline associated with the professor you are researching. This will sort our databases by department/discipline and bring you a list of databases most relevant to that subject.
• Look at that shorter list of databases to help you decide which ones to try searching in -- each database will have a short description of the kinds of topics it covers
• For the example below, I used Historical Abstracts, because I know that Prof. Davidson specializes in French history, and the description of Historical Abstracts indicates that it covers history for all countries except the US and Canada. (Interested in those two countries? Use the database America: History and Life)
• Click on Advanced Search (virtually all of our databases have an Advanced Search option!) and enter your professor's name last name first in a search box.
• Select "Author" in the dropdown menu next to the search box. This limits your search to articles and other materials written by your professor.

Should I click the "Scholarly/Peer Reviewed" button in Advanced Search?

Clicking this button will limit your searching to just scholarly/peer-reviewed articles. Which is a great feature, and will lead you to useful scholarship!

But many faculty are also interested in writing for more general audiences these days, and leaving that button unchecked may also lead you to articles like those.

You can always check "Scholarly/Peer Reviewed" to limit your search results from the list of results that come up. It's up to you!

These databases are more general scholarly databases -- they cover a broad range of subject areas. All of them have Advanced Search options that will let you search by "Author."

Be aware, though, that you may need to scroll through the results to find your professor. Searching in Academic Search Complete for "Davidson, Denise" turned up at least one Denise Davidson who is not a professor of History at GSU. If you really can't tell, check the article record to see if it has information about the author's affiliation, which should help).

And, of course, Google Scholar will help as well. Click here for information about connecting Google Scholar with the library's holdings.