Comments Off on Finding the Author of an Article

By Scott Pfitzinger, January 18, 2006 2:23 pm

Need to find the name of an author when you don’t know the name of articles they’ve written?

Many of our databases have Indexes where you can search and browse through all the entries they have for that field (such as Author, Subject, Publisher, or even Language). Just look for the Indexes button at the top of the screen and select the field you want to search. Then put in one or more of the letters that the name starts with. It may take some browsing through screens, but it can help you find an author when you don’t know how to spell his/her name.

Comments Off on Finding an Author

By Scott Pfitzinger, January 18, 2006 2:13 pm

Here is an interesting reference question I got today.

A couple of students had an assignment where they were supposed to find the most recent article about child abuse by someone. The name they were given was D. Chicketty and they were told it was written phonetically, like they might have written it if they’d only been told the name. The first step was finding the real name of the author and then the next was finding the most recent article.

The first part was the hardest and was all I helped them with. The Psychology-related EBSCO databases don’t have a plain old list of authors, but they do have an Indexes button, where you can browse (and search) for terms in any of the standard fields they use. After poking around the Authors Index for a while, I figured out that the author was Italian and the spelling was really Dante Cichetti. Double-clicking the author’s name put the search terms in the “Find” textbox. Unfortunately, that only led to one article. I thought that odd, so I tried Googling the name and I got that good old “Did you mean _______?” link at the top, with the last name spelled differently (Cicchetti). Going back to PsycInfo and using THAT spelling, I was able to find tons of material (207 hits with Dante Cicchetti as an author).

It was a nice combination of using our subscription databases and Google.

Comments Off on IM Reference

By bmatthie, December 5, 2005 7:01 pm

For those that are curious, here are the numbers of reference transactions we’ve done over Instant Messenger since we implemented it:

August – 2
September – 4
October – 9
November – 16
December – 4 already (in the first 5 days, Thursday – Monday)

There are 20 users listed as Recent Buddies, so that means at least that many different students have used our IM services. Presumably, they’ve got us added as Buddies on their own buddy lists, so they’ll be more likely to ask again when they have questions.

Scott