Finding an Author
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.
Themocracy