Skip to Main Content

Research Guides

Eastern Washington University Libraries

English 250: Introduction to Genre

Find a Specific Story or Essay

Step 1: Try searching the EWU Library Catalog

  • Put the title of the story/essay "in quotes" and add the last name of the author.
  • The Catalog looks through the table of contents of virtually all the recent books (1990s to the present), so you can see if it is in an anthology.
  • It also has millions of article records. NOTE: The default search only shows the articles we have full text. If it doesn't come up, try expanding the search by checking the box on the top left Include results with no full text.

Step 2: Google the title and author to see where Google thinks it was published.

  • If you are lucky, you can find a copy that the publication put online for free. (You'll need to judge whether it is authentic.) 
  • But at a minimum, you're looking for citation information, courtesy of Google. Find the name of the magazine and the date, or the title of the book and a publication date.

Step 3: Go back to the EWU Library Catalog and search by the name of the magazine or the title of the book.

  • While the Catalog has a ton of article records, it doesn't know about every article in a magazine, especially pre-1990s. But the Catalog does know exactly what magazines and date ranges that we have physically and online.
  • Also, not every book record has the table of contents. Search by title of the book, most likely an older anthology or collection of short stories by the author.