Biography Index, produced by The H.W. Wilson Company, is a bibliographic database that cites biographical material appearing in periodicals indexed in other Wilson Company databases and additional selected periodicals, current books of individual and collective biography, and incidental biographical material in otherwise non-biographical books. Periodicals indexed are selected from all subject areas represented by other Wilson Company databases. Biographical subjects indexed range from antiquity to the present and represent all fields and nationalities.

Contents

Fields
Document Types List
Physical Description List
Journal List
Using Limit Fields
Sample Searches
Stopwords

Highlighted fields are limit fields.

The Citation (CITN) consists of the TI, OT, AU, CA, SO, PB, DE, and SJ fields.

The AN field contains a unique 12-character number that identifies the document.

marjorie williams in au
williams-marjorie-c in au
williams* in au

The AU field identifies the person(s) responsible for the intellectual content of an article or book. Author's names can be searched with or without hyphens. When searching without hyphens, type last name followed by first name or first name followed by last name. The order of the words does not matter. Do not type a comma.

When searching an author's name with hyphens, type the last name first and hyphenate all names and initials. Use truncation (*) if you are not sure about spelling.

You can search author names by last name, using the AUT Author Name Index in Browse (Index).

Fields
Contents

AUT Author Name
(a limit field)

The AUT field identifies the author of a book or an article. Use Browse to search for the author by last name in this Author Name index. The AUT field is for searching only; it does not display in the record.

united press in ca

The CA field identifies the association, institution, conference, corporation, or government agency that is the author of a book. You can search any word or phrase in this field.

The CL field contains the letter Y if a book is a work of children's literature; this field contains the letter N if the book is not a work of children's literature.

884 in cn
cn=884

The CN field lists the Dewey Decimal classification number and the Library of Congress classification number for books. This field is range searchable.

officials in de
postal-officials in de

The DE field contains controlled vocabulary terms describing the occupation or profession of the person who is the subject of a biography. It also contains terms describing the form or genre of the biography, such as bibliography, fiction, juvenile literature, pictorial works, etc.

Use hyphens to focus your search. Use without hyphens to enlarge your search. In the example above, officials in de retrieves records containing any descriptor with the word officials, such as foundation officials or government officials American. The search postal-officials in de retrieves just that specific descriptor.

You can search Descriptors using the SU Subject index in Browse (Index).

interview in dt
dt=books

The Document Type field describes the biographical material in an article or book. Use this field to limit your search to records of a particular type, such as interview, autobiography and so on.

In this database, books is used for citations that come from a book-chapter or book. See the Document Types List for a complete list of the document types in this database.

Fields
Contents

The IB field lists the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for a book. Omit hyphens when searching for an ISBN.

IS  ISSN
(a limit field)

0733-8899 in is
is=0733-8899

The IS field lists the International Standard Serial Number. Include hyphens when searching for an ISSN.

JI Journal Issue
(a limit field)

The JI Journal Issue field lists the issues of journals included in the database. You can search for a specific issue of a journal using the JI Index in the Browse (Index).

JN Journal Name
(a limit field)

The JN Journal Name field lists the names of the journals included in the database. You can search for a specific journal using the JN Index in the Browse (Index).

The LA field lists the language of an article or book. When searching, use the full language name. The most commonly used languages in Biography Index are English, French, and German.

The Notes field contains additional information about the book cited, such as the edition or the publisher's series. It gives the pagination of each biography contained in a collected biography.

The OT field provides additional title access. It may include descriptive words added by the indexer to augment the title. You can search any word or phrase in this field.

The PB field contains the name of the publisher, the publication year, and the paging of the book. You can search for any word or phrase in this field.

The PD field contains details about illustrative or graphic material that appear in an article or book. It contains one or more codes or descriptive phrases. The following is a list of codes and the physical description each represents:

PEI Peer Reviewed Journal
(a limit field)

The PEI field indicates whether the document is from a peer-reviewed journal. The field contains a y if the journal is peer-reviewed.

The Publication Year lists the year of publication of a periodical or book. This field is range searchable.

The SB field contains the name of the person who is the subject of a biography. Use Browse to search by last name in this Subject of Biography index. The SB field is for searching only. It does not display in the record. Subject of biography names display in the SJ Biography Name field.

SJ Biography Name

The SJ field contains the name and occupation of the person who is the subject of a biography. The biography may be an article, a book, or a part of a book.

A person's name can be searched with or without hyphens. When searching without hyphens, type last name followed by first name or first name followed by last name. The order of the words does not matter. You can search for any word or phrase in an occupation or profession.

When searching with hyphens, type the last name first and hyphenate all names and initials. Use truncation (*) if you are not sure about spelling.

You can search biography names by last name, using the SB Subject of Biography index in Browse (Index).

If a book is part of a series, the Series Title field indicates the title of the series.

For an article the Source field indicates the bibliographic source of the entry including the journal name, volume number, publication date, and page numbers. You can search for any word or phrase in this field.

If a search operator (OR, AND, NOT, IN, WITH, or NEAR) appears in the title for which you are searching, enclose it within quotes, as shown in the example.

SU Subject
(a limit field)

The SU field lists the controlled vocabulary terms that describe the document. The field can include personal names, topical names, organization names, geographic names, and uniform titles. This field is for browsing subject headings (descriptors) using the SU Subject index in Browse (Index). The SU field does not display in the record. Subject headings display in the DE Descriptor field.

The Title field contains the title of an article, book, or book chapter. You can search for any word or phrase in a title.

UD Update Code
(a limit field)

The UD field indicates the year, month, and day in which the record was added to the database in the format yyyymmdd. You can search for a single date using in or =, as shown above. In addition, you can search for a range of dates using the following operators:

< less than,
such as ud<19940802

> greater than,
such as ud>19940802

<= less than or equal to,
such as ud<=19940802

>= greater than or equal to,
such as ud>=19940802

- within a range,
such as ud=19990801-19990901

The Citation (CITN) consists of the TI, OT, AU, CA, SO, PB, DE and SJ fields. This is the default display for this database.

The Document Type (DT) field contains keywords that characterize the contents of an article or book. Use this field to limit your search to a particular kind of record, such as an article interview or obituary, or an autobiography or biography from a book or an article.

Autobiography
Biography
Books
Interview
Obituary

The Physical Description (PD) field contains details about illustrative or graphic material that appear in an article or book. It contains one or more codes or descriptive phrases. The following is a list of codes and the physical description each represents:

The Biography Index database cites biographical material from periodicals indexed by other H.W. Wilson databases. Thus, any periodical indexed by another H.W. Wilson database may also be indexed in this database if it publishes pertinent biographical material. Additionally, this database indexes the select list of publications cited below, with significant coverage of The New York Times Biographical Service and of obituaries from the New York Times Late New York Edition.

Biography (A&E)
Biography for Beginners
The New York Times (Late New York Edition)
The New York Times Biographical Service
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society

Limit fields, when combined with other search terms, these are particularly useful for focusing or limiting a search. To search a limit field, use the in or = operators with the field abbreviation, such as 1984 in py or py=1984. Omitting the field label retrieves information from free text (non-limit) fields only.

For limit fields containing numeric data, you can also use other special operators:

= equal to py=1990
< less than py<1991
> greater than py>1989
<= less than or equal to py<=1990
>= greater than or equal to py>=1988
- indicates a range py=1988-1990

Below are several examples of the types of searches you can use to retrieve information from this database.

Authors' names appear in the Author(s) (AU) field.

To see all authors with the same last name or to see variations of an author's name, use the Browse (Index). You can search for authors' names using the AUT Author Name index in Browse (Index). For example, to look for works by Maya Angelou:

1. Go to Browse (Index).
2. Select the AUT Author Name index.
3.Type angelou.

Searching Using Descriptors

The Descriptors (DE) field lists the controlled vocabulary terms that describe the document. This field can include personal names, uniform titles, topical terms, organization names, and geographic names.

You can search in the DE field with or without hyphens. Searching a single term (for example, presidents in de) retrieves records containing any descriptor with the word presidents, such as college presidents, presidents American, or children of presidents. The search vice-presidents in de retrieves just that specific descriptor. With hyphens, the terms must be an exact match in the Descriptor.

You can search for Descriptors using the SU Subject index in Browse (Index).

Searching with truncation lets you retrieve records containing variations of your term. For example, let's search for autobiographies with political content in journals.

1. First conduct a search for the term autobiography in dt.

2. Next, search for and politic*. Beginning the search request with the operator AND automatically combines it with the previous search. The asterisk (truncation symbol) searches for all terms beginning with the root politic, such as political, politician, and so on.

3. Conduct a search for not books in dt. This request limits the search to citations that are journal articles.

Certain words of little intrinsic meaning appear too frequently to be useful in searching text. Information systems call these "stopwords"; you will not be able to search for the following words alone in the Biography Index database. They can be included within a phrase, but they will be ignored.

an
and
are
for
from
in
of
or
that
the
was
were
which
with