Bibliographies in general books
A good reference work (for example The Oxford History of English Literature), or handbook (for example, one of the Cambridge Companions series) may give you some additional core references to pursue. You might also look for a general book about the specific author or text and browse through their references and bibliography. Make sure it is fairly up to date so that it reflects the current state of research.
Browse the shelves
Once you know the general area of the physical library space in which a particular author or texts are located, you will probably enjoy browsing the shelves. You may well stumble across books which you might not have found or thought to look at using a catalogue or reading list. You could also use the wordcloud function in LibrarySearch to explore related areas of the library.
Find the main scholars on a topic
You will begin to get a sense of who the scholars are who have published extensively on a particular topic, and who are leading authorities in their field. You could search for more publications by these figures in the catalogue, or look up their webpage in their institution to see their publications.
Other online tools and resources:
- Use Literature Online to help you find journal articles and other related works.
- Use the Arts and Humanities Citation Index to track down journal articles. You may need to search elsewhere to find the actual items.
- British Library's Electronic Table of Contents (ZETOC)
- Subject gateways such as Intute which collate good quality online resources (make sure these are up to date and being maintained).
Keeping up to date with secondary works
This is less important for a weekly supervision essay, but if you are working on a longer piece such as a dissertation, it is important to be aware that academics and researchers are constantly writing about the authors and topics that you are researching. If you do not perform any searches beyond the first initial one at the beginning of your project, you may miss works which have been published since. New publications (monographs and journals) regularly come into the Faculty Library and the University Library. You can easily keep up to date with what is being published on the topic that you are interested in without needing to search the catalogues and databases regularly. You may even find something of which your supervisor is unaware.
Try the following:
There is more information on the English Faculty Library website