Scholarly articles (sometimes known as literary criticism, or critical material) about your author or your work may hold clues about your story's first printing. If you're lucky, you might even find articles focusing on textual variants of your story.
You can find literary criticism in books (look in the catalog for "[your author's name] AND criticism"), but also in online article databases. Below are some top contenders for finding scholarly articles about literature.
How to Access Articles
You may notice that the database doesn't always provide you with a PDF of the article -- sometimes it will just give you an abstract. In that situation look for the 
If it's something that we don't have, you can request it by interlibrary loan. They'll send a PDF of the article straight to your inbox, typically within a few days!
