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Spanish and Portuguese

Recommended Resources

Finding Spanish or Portuguese language books is not different from finding English language books. The key is using the right keywords to search your topic. Likewise, finding ebooks is not different from finding print books. Commonly in literary studies, you need to find:

  • Books about authors and their work in general (such as biographies)
  • Books about literary criticism where it analyzes an author's specific work or works
  • Books about a literary movement e.g., Romanticism, Modernism, or the participation of an author(s) in a particular literary movement

Similarly, if you are looking for books about linguistics, useful sample searches are:

  • Spanish [AND] linguistics
  • Portuguese OR “Brazilian Portuguese” AND linguistics
  • Catalan [AND] linguistics

To make sure that you only get books results when you search the UC Library Search:

  • Go to the Advanced Search and select “Books” under Material Type, so your result list only books (both print and ebooks). You can further narrow the search by dates or language.
  • Can't find a book? On the left side menu in the UC Library Search, Select: “WorldCat” under External Search. After you find the book you need, Click on: “Get it at UC”. This will get you back to our system, where you can request the book through interlibrary loan.

 

Here are more tips for searching for books: 

  • To find books about a specific author, search for their name under “Title”
  • To find books written by an author, search for them using the “Author” option.
  • If you want to find Spanish or Portuguese language books, narrow down your results by language using the Advanced Search option in any UCSB Library Search or any literature database. Look for the words, filter, or limit to control the results list.
  • If you have questions about searching for books in Spanish, contact me!
In addition, you can search eBooks collections that focus only in Latin American Studies and/or Iberian Studies. Some of them are Open Access while others are licensed by the library. See below for some examples.
You can search for individual journals that focus on Spanish or Portuguese language studies as well as Latin America and Iberian Studies. Sometimes these journals may have what is called a special issue where the whole volume focuses on a particular topic, e.g. bilingualism. To find which Spanish or Portuguese journals are available online visit the Journal Search (see link below). Type Spanish or Portuguese to see a list of journals with that title. If you know the title of a journal, you can search for it too, and see what type of access we have at the library.
Remember to always login all databases with your UCSB netID and password to access licensed resources 

 

Here are my recommended databases to search for articles (AKA as academic/scholarly/peer-review articles) for Spanish and Portuguese:

Finding Films