The Citation (CITN) consists of the TI, OT, AU, SO, DE and DE2 fields.

AN Accession Number
(a limit field)

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

Fields
Contents

AU Personal Author

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.

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 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 person(s) responsible for 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.

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.

Use hyphens to focus your search. Use without hyphens to enlarge your search. In the example above, energy in de retrieves records containing any descriptor with the words energy, such as energy conservation or nuclear energy. The search energy-conservation in de retrieves just that specific descriptor.

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

DE2 Historical Subjects

energy in de2
energy-conservation in de2

The DE2 field lists the historical vocabulary terms that describe the document. This field includes topical terms and geographic names.

Use hyphens to focus your search. Use without hyphens to enlarge your search. In the example above, energy in de2 retrieves records containing any descriptor with the word energy, such as energy conservation or nuclear energy. The search energy-conservation in de2 retrieves just that specific descriptor.

You can search for Descriptors using the S2U Historical Topics List index in Browse (Index).

DT Document Type
(a limit field)

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 biography, interview, etc. Use hyphens to search for multiword document types.

IS ISSN
(a limit field)

The IS field lists the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). 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 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 PD field indicates whether illustrative or graphic material appears in the original document. The PD field contains one or more codes that describe the accompanying material. The following is a list of codes and the physical description each represents:

PY Publication Year
(a limit field)

The PY field lists the year in which the original document was published. This field is range searchable.

SO Source  

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 Topics List
(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 Topics List index in Browse (Index). The SU field does not display in the record. Subject headings display in the DE Subjects field.

The TI field contains the full title of the article. You can search for any word or phrase in the title.

The all Subjects Field includes the Subjects (DE) and the Historical Subjects (DE2) fields.

The Citation (CITN) consists of the TI, OT, AU, SO, DE and DE2 fields.

The Document Type (DT) field contains keywords that characterize the article contents. Use these words to limit your search to a particular kind of article.

Feature-Article
Poem
Short-Story

View the most current Journal List.

Limit fields, when combined with other search terms, 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 bibl in pd or pd=bibl. 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:

< less than,
such as py<1983

> greater than,
such as py>1981

<= less than or equal to,
such as py<=1980

>= greater than or equal to,
such as py>=1978

indicates a range,
such as py=1978-1980

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

Authors' names appear in the Personal Author (AU).

To see all personal 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 articles by Mark Hulbert:

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

Searching Using Subjects

The Subjects (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, pollution in de) retrieves records containing any descriptor with the word pollution, such as air pollution, marine pollution, or air pollution history. The search air-pollution-control in de retrieves just that specific descriptor.

With hyphens, the terms must be an exact match in the Subject. Search for pollution- if you want only those records indexed with the single descriptor pollution.

You can search for Subjects using the SU Topics List index in Browse (Index).

Search for historical subjects in the Historical Subjects (DE2) field and also use the S2U Historical Topics List index in Browse (Index).

Searching with truncation lets you retrieve records containing variations of your term. For example, let's search for records about oil pollution.

The asterisk (truncation symbol) searches for all terms beginning with the root pollut, such as pollution and pollutant.

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