The biographies are searchable by name, profession, title, place of origin, gender, race/ethnicity, titles of works, date of birth, date of death, keyword, and presence of images.

Highlighted fields are limit fields.

There is also a special subset of fields, Citation (CITN), which consists of the SJ, PS, and DE fields. Use Citation to display, print, or save only these fields for a set of records.

The AD field indicates the address of the subject of the biography. This field appears in many of the more recent biographies.

AN Accession Number
(a limit field)

The AN field contains a unique twelve digit code (4 letters identifying the database, followed by 8 numbers) which identifies the document.

BB Date of Birth
(a limit field)

The BB field contains the date of birth of the subject. You can search on a specific date (mar 7 1924), on a day of any year (mar 7) or on a year (1924). You may spell out the months or use the three letter abbreviations.

CN Century
(a limit field)

The CN field contains the century in which an author worked. For the centuries from 8 B.C. to 1 B.C., you may type the number of the century followed by a hyphen and "bc". For the centuries from the 1st Century A.D. till the Twentieth Century, simply type the number of the century.

The CP field contains the H.W.Wilson copyright statement.

DD Date of Death
(a limit field)

The DD field contains the date of death of the subject. You can search on a specific date (Nov 8 1990), on a day of any year (nov 8) or on a year (1990). You may spell out the months or use the three letter abbreviations.

DE Descriptor
(a limit field)

The DE field combines the information from the Subject of Biography (SB), Profession (PR), and Genre (GN) fields.

DT Record Type
(a limit field)

There are two types of records in Wilson Biographies Plus Illustrated. The DT field identifies the record type: biography, or obituary. A biography is the full-text biographical article, an obituary is the full-text of an obituary.

GD Gender
(a limit field)

The GD indicates the gender of the biographee: m or f.

The Genre field contains the genre(s) and/or the subjects on which the biographee wrote. (This is only used in records that come from Wilson's World Author Series.)

The IAB field indicates the presence of additional records containing abstracts about the subject of the biography. The field contains a link to the additional records.

The IBR field indicates the presence of records from Book Review Digest about the subject of the biography. The field contains a link to the additional records.

The ICT field indicates the presence of additional records that don't contain abstracts about the subject of the biography. The field contains a link to the additional records.

The IUR field indicates the presence of additional full-text records about the subject of the biography. The field contains a link to the additional records.

LA Language
(a limit field)

The Language field contains the language(s) in which the author wrote.

A note indicating that there is another article on that person in the database. This does not appear in every article for which the subject of the article has more than one entry.

PHC Photograph Credit

The PHC field indicates the source of the primary photo used with the biography.

The photos are printed with permission. Reproduction for the purpose of commercial use separate and apart from use of the database of any such still image(s) by printing or any other means of electronic copying is prohibited by applicable law.

PII Primary Image Indicator
(a limit field)

The PII field indicates whether there is an image for the biographee. If there is an image, the field contains a Y, otherwise the field is blank.

PL Place of Origin
(a limit field)

The PL field indicates the place of origin of the biographee. You may search by American state, Canadian province, country, continent, or region. If the term you are searching is more than one word.

The PN field contains the phonetic pronunciation of the subject's name

PR Profession
(a limit field)

The PR field contains the subject's profession(s). Multiple professions may be listed and searches for broader terms will also locate the subject.You can use the online Thesaurus to find narrower and broader profession terms.

The PS field contains a brief description of the article. It gives the year that the article was written, the name of the book the article originally appeared in, and if the article has been updated, it gives the year of the update.

PY Publication Year
(a limit field)

The PY field indicates the publication year of the book in which the article originally appeared.

RA Race
(a limit field)

The RA field indicates the race of the biographee. You may use the following terms:

African American (people living in the United States who are black)
Black (people living anywhere in the world, including the united states, who are black)
American Indian (includes people of Inuit descent and native Hawaiians)
Asian
Hispanic
Middle Eastern
White
Multiracial

The RF field contains a list of works about the subject

SB Subject of Biography
(a limit field)

The SB field contains the name of the subject. Searching can be done through the index by typing last name followed by "hyphen" followed by last name and then choosing from the resulting list. Searching can also be done through the search mode by typing first name followed by last name or last name followed by first name.

The SJ field contains the name of the subject and a note listing the birth and death dates and a brief description of the person (does not appear in all records) in display format. (In obituaries, the dates and description do not appear as part of the SJ field.)

SLI Secondary Link Indicator
(a limit field)

The SLI field indicates whether there are additional images for the biographee. In that case, the field contains a Y; otherwise the field is blank.

TW Title of Works
(a limit field)

The TW field contains titles of works by the biographee.

The TX field contains the main body of text on the subject. The full text of the profile is included and is fully searchable. In some cases, this text could be lengthy and continue for several screens.

TXI Full Text Indicator
(a limit field)

The TXI field indicates that the article is full text. If it is a full text article, the field will contain the letter "y' otherwise, it will be blank. All Biography and Obituary record types are full text and will contain a "y" in this field.

The WK field contains a list of works by the subject. The titles listed in this section are indexed and searchable as a TW field.

The Citation is a subset of the following fields:

Subject (SJ)
Publication Statement (PS)
Descriptor (DE)

The Citation serves as an easy way to display, print, or save only these fields for a set of records.

The limit fields listed below are specially indexed fields that have relatively few possible values. They allow you to limit your searches to records of a particular characteristic, such as profession or place of origin. You can use the indexes to see lists of these terms.

Accession Number (AN)
Century (CN)
Date of Birth (BB)
Date of Death (DD)
Descriptor (DE)
Full Text Indicator (TXI)
Gender (GD)
Language (LA)
Place of Origin (PL)
Primary Image Indicator (PII)
Profession (PR)
Publication Year (PY)
Race (RA)
Record Type (DT)
Secondary Link Indicator (SLI)
Source (SO)
Subject of Biography (SB)
Titles of Works (TW)

You can search these fields with in or =. For example, to retrieve documents originally published in 1990, type:

1990 in py or py=1990

In addition to in and =, the following operators may be used with the PY field:

< less than,
such as py<1990

> greater than,
such as py>1991

<= less than or equal to,
such as py<=1989

>= greater than or equal to,
such as py>=1992

- within a range,
such as py=1990-1992

The following are the article types that can be searched for in the Record Type (DT) field: Biographies, and Obituaries.

Biographies can vary in length, from 500 words to over 6,000 words, but most average about 3,000 words. In addition to the biographical text, they contain a list of works by the person, and a list of additional material on the person.

Obituaries are brief, usually under 750 words, overviews of the lives and careers of subjects profiled previously in Current Biography.

The online Thesaurus is a list of professions (PR) which can be used to facilitate searching in the database. This thesaurus enables you to select and search for related terms, broader terms and narrower terms. (The Thesaurus is not used in World Authors.)

1. Switch to the Thesaurus

2. Enter a term. A Permuted Index is displayed with the term you typed, or its closest equivalent, highlighted.

3. At this point, you can get term information, including related, broader, and narrower terms.

4. You can search for the term. Single Term searches for just the term you sleected; Explode searches for the selected term, plus all of its narrower terms.

Refer to the Help Index for more information on using the Thesaurus.

The following examples demonstrate how to search Wilson Biographies Plus Illustrated database. These examples are not exhaustive, but do illustrate several search techniques. It is important to note that, although all examples are given in lowercase, the program is not case-sensitive; whether your search terms are entered in upper- or lower-case, the same records will be retrieved.

To find a particular person:

The easiest way to locate an article on a specific person is to use the Browse mode, which presents a list of biographees. Click on the Change button and choose the Subject of Biography (SB) field. Then type the name you are searching for, last name followed by a hyphen followed by the first name. The closest name to your match will be highlighted in an alphabetical list of names under the search input box.

You can use the Browse mode to get lists of all terms for any of the limit fields.

You may also search for a particular person from the Search mode. Type the person's name followed by the words "in ps" or type "ps=" followed by the name. Do not use any punctuation in the name.

For example:

To find all the people who fit certain criteria, such as profession, place of origin, gender, race/ethnicity, date of birth or date of death, or any combination of the above, use the Search mode.

For example, you can search for all of the government officials from Europe by typing the following on the search line:

You could find all the African American women novelists that are profiled by typing:

Words of little intrinsic meaning that appear too frequently to be useful in searching text are known as "stopwords". You can not search for the following stopwords by themselves, but you can include them within phrases:

About
all
among
an
and
as
at
be
been
between
both
by
for
from
if
into
it
its
not
of
on
or
that
the
their
these
they
this
those
to
toward
upon
used
using
what
which
while
with
within

Beginning a search request with an operator (and, not, or, with, near, or in) automatically combines that request with the previous one.

For instance, if the search you just completed is health care searching for and insurance will give you the same results as if you search for health care and insurance. Similarly, the search health care followed by the search in ci is the same as health care in ci.

You can use the truncation symbol (*) as a substitute for any string of zero or more characters in your search term. For example, the search comput* retrieves any record containing "computer", "computers", "computing", "computerworld", etc.

You can use the wildcard symbol (?) as a substitute for one character or none. For example, the search m?cdonald retrieves records containing "McDonald" or "MacDonald".

The truncation and wildcard symbols can be used anywhere in your search term, except as the first character.

In addtion to the biographies contained in Wilson Biographies Plus Illustrated, the database also contains thousands of additional full-text, abstract, and citation records relating to those subjects.

These supplemental records are accessible through the text of the biography on the subject. Many of the biographies contain four fields at the end of the article: Full Text Link (IUR), Abstract Link (IAB), Book Review Link (IBR), and Citation Link (ICT), each of which contains a link to the additional records.

When you click one of those links, you are sent to a page that lists the different subjects for which there are records on that person. Click on the subject you wish to see records about to see those records. To return to the biography, use your browser's Back button.

Fields
Contents