Humanities Abstracts, produced by The H.W. Wilson Company, is a bibliographic database that cites articles from English-language periodicals.  Periodical coverage includes some of the best-known scholarly journals and numerous lesser-known but important specialized magazines.

Highlighted fields are limit fields.

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

pollution in ab

The Abstract 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)

199300516800 in an
an=199300516800

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

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AU Author(s)

blum john morton in au
blum in au
blum-j* in au

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).

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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.

american italian in ca

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

greek in de
greek-literature-history 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.

You can search terms in the DE field with or without hyphens. In the example above, greek in de retrieves records containing any descriptor with the word greek, such as greek-anthology or modern-greek-poetry. The search greek-literature-history in de retrieves just that specific descriptor.

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

DT Document Type
(a limit field)

poem in dt
dt=short-story

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 short-story or poem. Use hyphens to search for multiple word document types. See the Document Type List for a complete list of the document types in this database.

IS ISSN
(a limit field)

0031-2525 in is
is=0031-2525

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).

LA Language of Article
(a limit field)

english in la
la=english

The LA field lists the language of the original document. When searching, use the full language name.

For most records in this database, this field contains the language of the original article. For Book Review records, this field contains the word "undetermined" since this database does not provide the language of the book being reviewed.

discussion in ot

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.

il in pd
pd=il

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:

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

PY Publication Year
(a limit field)

The Publication Year lists the year in which the document was published.

SO Source  

The SO 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 the original document. 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 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.

The Uniform Title field contains the standardized title for a work that has appeared under various titles or in various versions. Uniform titles include items such as anonymous classics and sacred books.

The Citation (CITN) consists of the TI, OT, AU, SO, AB, and DE fields. These fields are the default display for this database.

The Document Type (DT) field contains keywords that characterize the contents of the original document. Use these words to limit your search to a particular kind of article. Hyphenate multiple-word document types. The following is a list of document types:

Ballet-Review
Bibliography
Book-Review
Dance-Review
Exhibit
Feature-Article
Fiction
Interview
Motion-Picture-Review
Musical-Comedy-Review
Obituary
Opera-Review
Operetta-Review
Oratorio-Review
Play
Play-Review
Poem
Radio-Program-Review
Short-Story
Television-Program-Review
Videotape-Review

The Language of Article (LA) field lists the language of the original document. Most articles are written in the English language, but some non-English language works are indexed. The following is a list of article languages:

Chinese
English
Finnish
French
German
Italian
Latin
Modern-Greek
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Ukrainian
Welsh

The Physical Description (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:

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View the most current Journal List.

The 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<1993

> greater than,
such as py>1991

<= less than or equal to,
such as py<=1990

>= greater than or equal to,
such as py>=1988

- indicates a range,
such as 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 articles by Bernard Gert.

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

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, philosophy in de) retrieves records containing any descriptor with the word philosophy, such as philosophy and religion, comparative philosophy or art philosophy. The search philosophy-and-history in de retrieves just that specific descriptor.

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

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 a poem by Jeanne Walker, the title of which mentions "Aunt Joe."

1. First conduct a search for dt=poem.

2. Next search for and walker-* in au. Beginning the search request with the AND operator automatically adds it to the previous search. Using the asterisk truncation symbol searches for all terms beginning with the root walker such as Walker-David-H, Walker-Jeanne-Murray, etc.

3. Conduct a search for and aunt joe in ti.

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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