QuickStart Guide—Searching by Author

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To search for an author using Quick Search:

1. Change the top drop-down menu box to Author.

2. In the search box, enter the author’s name in inverted format (lastname, firstname). The comma tells Booklist Online to look for the name preceding it as a last name only.

Example : Davis, Denise

3. Click on the Go button.

Note: Booklist Online will find records matching your author criteria both from reviews and feature content, and from all sections, unless you limit these by changing the All Content and All Sections drop-down boxes.

Note: Author searching in Booklist Online is case-insensitive; using capital letters or lower-case letters will make no difference in the search.

Note: All authors’ names are entered in the database in inverted order (Davis, Denise), even though they may display in direct order (Denise M. Davis).

If you don’t find something that you expect to find:

Author searching can be tricky because authors’ names may be printed differently in different books. Sometimes there may be a middle name, other times only a middle initial, sometimes no middle name, even though the author has one. Sometimes there may be initials only for the first or for the first and middle names. To work around this problem, you have two choices:

1. Do a broad search, matching the last name only. You search may retrieve a large number of results for you to scan through.

Example: Davis, retrieves over 300 titles where Davis is the last name of an author.

2. Do a narrow search, or a series of narrow searches, searching on all variations of the name. You may have to do several searches to find all titles, and you still may not find them all.

Examples:

Davis, Denise

Davis, Denise M

Davis, Denise Marie

Denise Davis

Denise M. Davis

Denise M Davis

Denise Marie Davis

Denise

In the above examples, search numbers 1, 2, 5, and 8 retrieved results, producing a title by Denise M. Davis; numbers 3,4,6 and 7 did not.

The following examples show more about how the Booklist Online search engine works when searching authors:

Examples: Searching on

ross

finds works by the following:

King, Ross

MacDonald, Ross

Ross, Catherine

Rossotti, Charles O.

Searching on

ross,

finds works where Ross is the last name of the author:

Ross, Catherine

Ross, Stewart

Searching on

ross, ca

finds works by:

Ross, Catherine

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick

Ross, Calvin

Searching on

ross, catherine

finds works by:

Ross, Catherine

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick

Searching on

Ross, Catherine Sheldrick

finds works by Catherine Sheldrick Ross but does not find the one by Catherine Ross.

Note: There are multiple author fields in the Booklist Online database that include names for all individual and corporate authors, editors, and other persons responsible for a particular work. Although all author fields are searched, for reasons of space and consistency, some may not be displayed when there are several co-authors for a work.

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