This database is a premier collection of literature resources that allows users access to a wealth of current scholarship, authoritative reference material, and bibliographic information. This resource offers unsurpassed funtionality across the extensive literary journal criticism and reference materials.

Literature Online Reference Edition is fully cross-searchable and allows students to find definitions of critical terms, encyclopedia entries on individual works, up-to-date critical biographies of over 4,100 authors, primary and secondary author bibliographies, and full-text articles from 241 leading literary journals. The journals are accessed through the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) database, a frequently updated index that currently includes records of over 880,000 works of literary criticism. ABELL is the only literary index with an electronic backfile from 1920 onwards. Journal searching functionality allows eleven different fields and limiters across this extensive collection of full-text journals.  Each full-text journal is completely browseable by title, as well.

In addition to a range of leading reference works and dictionaries, Literature Online Reference Edition also contains links to a quality-controlled selection of over 5,250 external websites. Each monthly release contains substantial additions as new reference works, journal titles and issues, websites, biographies, and bibliographies are added.

Literature Online Reference Edition is a service designed for institutions that need access to a dynamic and comprehensive body of critical and reference resources, but do not require the extensive library of primary texts given by Literature Online.