Art Abstracts, produced by The H.W. Wilson Company, is a bibliographic database that indexes and abstracts articles from periodicals published throughout the world. Periodical coverage includes English-language periodicals, yearbooks, and museum bulletins, as well as periodicals published in French, Italian, German, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish. In addition to articles, Art Abstracts indexes reproductions of works of art that appear in indexed periodicals. Abstracting coverage begins with January 1994. The abstracts range from 50 to 300 words and describe the content and scope of the source articles.

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Document Types List
Illustration Abbreviations List
Languages 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, SO, AB, DE, and DT fields.

The AB field contains a summary of the document. You can search any word or phrase in the abstract.

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AN Accession Number
(a limit field)

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

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The AR field identifies the name of the artist and the title of the illustration of the artist's work that accompanies the article.

Listed after the title of each work is the term (illustration). You can search for this term in the AR field. The number (if any) listed after the title indicates the number of illustrations of that particular work. You can search for any word or phrase in a title. The terms col, det, or other such abbreviations describe the illustration itself. See the Illustration Abbreviations List for an explanation of the abbreviations used.

When the document type is art reproduction, the AR field contains the name of the artist who created the original work.

When searching for an artist, put the last name first and hyphenate all names and initials.

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The AU field identifies the person(s) responsible for the intellectual content of the document.

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 your are not sure about spelling.

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

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AUT Author Name
(a limit field)

The AUT field identifies the person(s) responsible for the intellectual content of the document. 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.

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painting in de
painting-technique in de

The 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.

For an art reproduction the DE field lists the name and dates of the artist.

Use hyphens to focus your search. Omit hyphens to enlarge your search. For example, painting in de retrieves records containing the descriptor terms painting-american-exhibitions as well as painting-technique. The search painting-technique in de retrieves records with just that specific descriptor.

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DT Document Type
(a limit field)

interview in dt
dt=book-review

The Document Type field describes the contents of the original document. Use the DT field to limit your search to records of a particular type of document, such as an art reproduction or an interview. Include hyphens for multi-word document types. See the Document Types List for a complete list of the document types in this database.

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IS ISSN
(a limit field)

0002-7375 in is
is=0002-7375

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

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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 Browse (Index).

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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 Browse (Index).

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LA Language of Article
(a limit field)

The LA field lists the language of the original document. When searching, use the full language name. This database includes both English and non-English language works.

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

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PD Physical Description
(a limit field)

The PD field contains details about illustrative or graphic material that appears in the original document. It contains one or more codes or descriptive phrases. See the Physical Descriptions List for a complete list of the physical description codes used in this database.

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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. This field is for searching only; it does not display in the record.

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PY Publication Year
(a limit field)

The Publication Year lists the year in which the document was published. This field is range searchable.

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SO Source (Bibliographic Citation)

The SO field indicates the bibliographic source of the entry, including the journal name, volume number, publication date, and page numbers. Use quotation marks when searching for journals with an operator in the title, such as AND, IN, etc. See the Journals List for a complete list of journals in the database.

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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.

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The Title field contains the title of a work. You can search for any word or phrase in a title. For art reproductions the medium of the original work is listed in parentheses after the title. Following is a list of abbreviations used to describe the medium of the original work:

drwg - drawing(s)
engr - engraving(s)
etch - etching(s)
litho - lithograph(s)
paint - painting(s)
photo - photograph
sculp - sculpture

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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

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The URL2 Web Sites field lists the URLs of web sites chosen by the author of the article. These related internet links provide additional information on subjects discussed in the document.

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The Citation (CITN) consists of the TI, OT, AU, SO, AB, DE, and DT fields.

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The Artist and Work (AR) field, which identifies the name of an artist and the title of an illustration or reproduction of the artist's work, uses several abbreviations that indicate the form taken by the illustration and/or its location in the source work. Following is a list of abbreviations used in the AR field:

col - color
cov(s) - cover(s)
det(s) - detail(s)
p - page
pl(s) - plate(s)

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The Language of Article (LA) field lists the language of the original document. The following is a list of article languages:

Greek-Ancient
Danish
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Greek-Modern
Norwegian
Spanish
Swedish

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

Below are several examples of the types of searches you can use to retrieve information from the Art Abstracts 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 author names using the AUT Author Name index in Browse (Index). For example, to look for articles by Edie Lee Cohen:

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

You can search for an art reproduction using the DT field. For example, let's look for articles citing Campbell Soup.

1. First conduct a search for the terms campbell near soup. Using the NEAR operator looks for records with the two terms in the same sentence.

2. Next search for and art-reproduction in dt. This request limits the search to the art reproduction document type. Beginning the search request with the AND operator automatically adds it to the previous search.

Artists' names appear in the Artist and Work (AR) field and are hyphenated with the last name first. For example, let's look for articles about the artist Henry Moore.

Conduct a search for moore-henry in ar. This request limits your search to the Artist and Work field.

If you are unsure of the artist name you can select the name directly from the SU Subject index in Browse (Index).

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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 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

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