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Search skills: Finding works by a particular author

Applying theoretical frameworks and methods to your research

 

A simple search in Summon, as shown below, will find books and articles by a particular author, but also books and articles about that author, or which only mention him or her in passing:

 

But what if you are only interested in works by Barthes?  There are two options, firstly, you can click on his name in any search result, to be taken to a list of those of his works included  in Summon:

 

Alternatively, you can go to Summon's advanced search screen.  If you are starting from the library homepage, follow this link:

 

Or from Summon's results screen, follow the Options link at the right of the search box:

 

Once on the advanced search screen, change the first All Fields box to Author, and run your search again:

 

There is one disadvantage to the above technique: it will not always find individual chapters by your author, in books with chapters by several different authors.  To check for these, you will need to run a simple search, as shown at the top of this page, and individually check through the results. You can filter your results by Book/eBook and Conference Proceeding: these two categories will find all these extra chapters.

 

More techniques

For living authors, use a general search engine to see if they have a homepage or online list of publications, perhaps on the website of a university or other institution to which they are attached. if that institution maintains a repository, that can be a worthwhile place to search too.

 

Finally, see: