English

Session Outline

Here is a plan for what we will cover today:

1. Go over assignment details.

2. Provide an overview of how to search LibrarySearch and Google Scholar for scholarly sources.

3. Learn the difference between scholarly and non-scholarly sources.

4. Practice information evaluation skills.

5. Show a couple of different ways to get help if you have questions.

This work (Question Mark Symbol Icon Character, by Peggy_Marco), identified by Pixabay, is free of known copyright restrictions.

The Assignment

This assignment will consist of an annotated bibliography (10% of your final grade), a research presentation (10% of your final grade), and a final exam essay (worth 25% of your final grade).

Use a minimum of 3 research sources with at least 2 of them being academic (peer-reviewed journal articles or scholarly books).

Additional sources may include credible literary reviews, interviews, or cultural analyses.

Options:

1. Silvia Moreno-Garcia alludes to numerous fairy tales and classic works of Gothic literature and film throughout Mexican Gothic. Analyze how these intertextual references help her critique cultural myths surrounding innocence, purity, and power. What Gothic elements—such as the monstrous, the uncanny, or the entrapment of women—do these stories share? Why does Moreno-Garcia rework these familiar narratives in the context of 1950s Mexico? Consider how her use of Gothic and fairy-tale allusion deepens her commentary on race, class, and colonial inheritance.

NOTE: As with the other prompts in this assignment, use any secondary sources to support your opinion; do not forget that the novel is the focus of your study.

2. In Mexican Gothic, the discovery of eugenics texts in the Doyle library transforms the Gothic motif of “forbidden knowledge” into a critique of colonial science and racial hierarchy. Drawing on Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado’s claim that the novel exposes how colonizers enriched themselves through Mexico’s exploitation, analyze how Moreno-Garcia uses Gothic conventions—madness, scientific obsession, the decaying house, or the monstrous patriarch—to reveal the horrors of colonialism. How does she reimagine the Gothic genre to confront the racial and historical anxieties that haunt postcolonial Mexico?

Source: Prado, M. Sánchez.

NOTE: As with the other prompts in this assignment, use any secondary sources to support your opinion; do not forget that the novel is the focus of your study.

3. In Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia uses Gothic conventions—such as entrapment, madness, and the haunted domestic space—to critique the limited and repressive roles available to women in 1950s Mexican society. Drawing on the idea that the female Gothic is a “politically subversive genre articulating women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal structures” (Wallace 2), analyze how Moreno-Garcia reimagines these Gothic tropes to expose systems of control, both social and psychological. How does her feminist reworking of the Gothic tradition speak to the continuing relevance of these issues in her own contemporary context?

Source: Wallace, Diana and Andrew Smith. “Introduction: Defining the Female Gothic.” The Female Gothic: New Directions, edited by Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith. Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. [Link to this text can be found on your Reading List: Gothic Literature as Social Critique”]

NOTE: As with the other prompts in this assignment, use any secondary sources to support your opinion; do not forget that the novel is the focus of your study. 

4. In Mexican Gothic, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the wallpaper functions as a Gothic symbol of psychological confinement and feminine resistance. Analyze how the wallpaper and at least two other Gothic symbols (for example, the decaying mansion, the fungus, or the presence of ghosts) contribute to the novel’s atmosphere of dread and madness. How do these symbols reflect broader anxieties surrounding female oppression, medical authority, and mental health in mid-twentieth-century Mexico?

NOTE: As with the other prompts in this assignment, use any secondary sources to support your opinion; do not forget that the novel is the focus of your study.

Studying Mexican Gothic

Sometimes you will be asked to study and write about a literary work that hasn't received a lot of attention from scholars. This is likely to be the case in your study of Silvia Moreno-Garcia's novel Mexican Gothic. The research on this work is growing, but you may still need to think broadly about how to expand your search to find relevant sources to inform your own analysis.

Consider expanding the search for sources for your essay to include not only scholarly analysis of this specific text, but in-depth book reviews and background information about Gothic horror. See the advice below for information on different types of sources and some suggestions for how to find them.

Conducting Academic Research With LibrarySearch 

LibrarySearch is MRU Library's one-stop search interface/catalogue that brings together resources across format, time, and subject. 

We have millions of e-resources and 221,000 physical resources in our collection, and LibrarySearch searches across those.

Things to remember when using LibrarySearch:

1. Sign in to save searches, items, and to request materials.

2. Use the pin icon to save books and articles to your Favorites for future reference.

3. Use the filters on the right. You will use Availability, Resource Type, and Date filters most often. Filter settings can be "locked in" so that you don't have to reapply them to every search that you make.

4. Some items may not be available, however, you can request unavailable items using what is called interlibrary loan.

5. When viewing an item record, scroll down to the Get it (for hardcopy/physical items) or Access options (for electronic items) section to get access to the item.

Helpful Search Operators to Use in LibrarySearch

You can use what are called search operators to search in a way to combine or omit different terms by telling the search engine exactly what you want and this can help you save some time (and frustration!)

• Use quotation marks to keep specific phrases together:

  • "Mexican Gothic"

  •  "The Yellow Wallpaper"

• Use AND to combine search terms (LibrarySearch automatically creates an AND when you write terms one after another, but it can be good practice to use an AND to help you understand the searches that you build) (AND narrows your search):

  • "Gothic fiction" AND feminism

  • Horror AND Gothic AND postcolonial*

• Use OR to connect two or more similar terms (OR broadens your search):

  • criticism OR analysis OR commentary

• Use wild cards/truncation to substitute a letter or suffix with a symbol:

  • myth* (in this example, the search myth* will search for records that contain words such as myths, mythology, and mythological)

Conducting Academic Research With Google Scholar

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is another great way to find high quality resources.

Besides providing links to resources in MRU databases, Google Scholar links to online repositories that contain articles the author has been allowed to upload.  Academia.edu and ResearchGate are among the repositories searched by Google Scholar.

By clicking on the Settings icon, you can select library links to show library access for up to 5 libraries (type in Mount Royal and click on save).  If you are logged into MRU library, links should automatically populate if you are running a Google search in another window. 

Google Scholar has a nifty citation chaining function. The Cited by function will forward you to indexed scholarly material that has cited a resource that you may be interested in. The Related articles link will direct you to similar articles that may have the same metadata or keywords. 

Helpful Search Operators to Use in Google Scholar

Google Scholar's Advanced Search is found by clicking the menu icon in the top left.

You can also add search operators to Google Scholar searches to build your own custom advanced searches in similar ways to LibrarySearch:

• Use quotation marks to keep specific phrases together:

  • "Silvia Moreno-Garcia"

• Avoid using AND to combine search terms with Google Scholar, as the search engine automatically creates ANDs between concepts and sometimes adding an additional AND can confuse the search syntax.

• Use OR to connect two or more similar terms:

  • uncanny OR eerie

• Avoid using wild cards to substitute a letter or suffix with a symbol—instead write out the complete words and connect with an OR

  • allusion OR allusions OR allusiveness

Sample Searches

These searches all use LibrarySearch, our main search tool for finding scholarly sources. The following are sample searches you mind find useful for starting your own research. Take note of how these searches have some limits in place since you may need to change them.

Find book reviews and other general commentary on Moreno-Garcia's novel Mexican Gothic:

• "Silvia Moreno-Garcia" AND "Mexican Gothic"

Limited to peer-reviewed articles only that discuss the novel:

• "Silvia Moreno-Garcia" AND "Mexican Gothic"

Figure 1

Peter Steiner's Famous 1993 New Yorker Cartoon Illustrating an Issue Central to Information Evaluation

Note. From "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" [Cartoon], by P. Steiner, 1993, Wikimedia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg).

Evaluating Information

It is good to find lots of search results, but, in order to use information skilfully, you need to know how to evaluate that information to determine whether a specific resource is appropriate to use in a specific use case (i.e. for a specific assignment).

The phrase "evaluating information" actually stands in for a wide range of judgments that we make about information in many different contexts, whether those judgments are about relevance, timeliness, quality, etc.

Librarians have developed several different acronyms to help people remember useful criteria to use in information evaluation. One of my personal favourites is RADAR!

RADAR stands for

Relevance

Authority

Date

Accuracy

Reason for Creation

We can ask the following questions to help us assess each criterion:

Relevance:

• Does this source fit my topic?

• What is this source's intended audience?

  • Is that intended audience appropriate for my use case in this assignment?

Authority:

• Is/are the creator(s) of this source clearly identified or known to us?

• How important is it in this use case to trust the source's creator(s)?

  • If it is important, why should we trust the source's creator(s)?

  • Is the source's creator credentialed or an expert in their field?

Date:

• Is the creation or publication date of this source identified or known to us?

• Is this source too old?

Accuracy:

• Do this source's facts "check out"?

• Does the source have references of its own?

Reason for Creation (take your best guess at this question using judgments from earlier criteria):

• Why was this source made?

• Was this source made to sell a product or service, to inform/educate, to entertain, etc?

(Adapted from Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470-478. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551513478889)

Primary vs. Secondary Sources

Primary Sources

The literary work itself, such as a novel, poem, story, play, essay, or a collection of these works.

Secondary Sources

Research and scholarship about the primary source work, or about the author/creator of the primary source.

Articles and Books - your best option

• original research appears in peer reviewed journal articles, books, or individual book chapters

• in-depth analysis, criticism, and commentary

• may explore a literary work or set of works, or an author's works as a whole, or a particular literary theme

Reference Works

• sometimes called background sources, includes encyclopedias, handbooks, or companion guides

• only basic or introductory information on a topic or person

• may describe and criticize a work, author, theme, etc., but is not comprehensive literary research or criticism

Book Reviews

• generally written within two years of the time the book was published

• published in journals, trade and popular magazines

• may describe and criticize a work, author, theme, etc., but is not comprehensive literary research or criticism

Scholarly vs. Popular Sources

A scholarly publication contains articles written by experts in a particular field. The primary audience of these articles is other experts.

Many of these publications are also referred to as "peer-reviewed," academic, or "refereed." They all mean essentially the same thing and refer to the editorial and publication process in which scholars in the same field review the research and findings before the article is published.

Some Helpful Questions for Identifying a Scholarly/Academic Article

1. What are the author’s credentials? Was it written by an expert?

2. Was it published in a journal (is there a DOI?)? (If you are not sure if a source is a journal article, you can enter the title of the publication into Ulrichs Web to check.)

3. Does it use academic or more technical language?

4. Does it includes a reference list of sources that it is citing?

5. How long is it? (Scholarly articles are typically longer than popular or news articles.)

6. Does it have a "Received" and "Accepted" date on it?

7. Is it an actual article? (Sometimes other types of content are included in scholarly publications, such as editorials/opinion pieces and book reviews. Make sure you are looking at an article.)

 Add / Reorder 

Activity: Is It Scholarly?

To make sure we are all on the same page, let's put our knowledge to the test.

Skim the following resources available through the links keeping in mind the characteristics we have discussed in class (for example: what is this information and where did it come from? Was it written by an expert? Where is this source published?).

Vote whether you think this source is Scholarly or Not Scholarly.

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

Source 4

Source 5

Source 6

Source 7

Source 8

Citation Help

• Use the "cite" feature in most search tools to get you started with most resources (you will need to review and correct the citation).

• Cite Sources: Learn the correct way to cite sources by using these guides, tutorials, and videos.

  • MRU Guide to MLA style for Academic Work (2025-2026)

  • MRU Guide to Formatting Your MLA Paper (2025-2026)

  • MLA Handbook Plus

    • The go-to resource for writers of research papers and anyone citing sources. MLA Handbook Plus includes the full text of the ninth edition of the handbook.

• Academic Success Workshops: Academic Success Workshops are 75 minutes long and are offered both in-person and online. Registration is required.

• Appointments: Personalized online or in-person 30-minute appointments with a Learning Strategist at Student Learning Services located on the 2nd floor of the Riddell Library & Learning Centre.

• Use the Service Desk on the 1st floor of the RLLC for assistance as well as the library chat feature on the library website for quick citation questions.