Tutorials and Training Tools: Tutorial Transcript: Finding Articles by Discipline or Profession

National University Library Tutorial: Finding Articles by Discipline or Profession (Link)

This short tutorial will help you limit a search to articles by authors in a specific discipline or profession. (2:09)

In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at how you can find articles written by authors in a specific profession or discipline.

If you’re using an EBSCOhost database, such as Academic Search Complete, you can search the author affiliation field for a specific profession or discipline. To do this, type the letters AF in all caps, followed by the profession or discipline in parentheses.

As an example, let’s try searching for articles written by an author in a specific profession, like a geneticist. On the search results page, our results should be limited to articles written by geneticists.

To get more information, click on an article title. For example, if we click on the title of the first result, we can see in the Author Affiliation field that it was written by a population geneticist from the University of Arizona.

Let’s try another example, this time searching for articles written by an author in a particular discipline, like psychology. If we click on the title of the first result, we can see that this article was written by a professor of psychology at Yale University.

If you’re using a ProQuest database, such as ProQuest Central, you can search in the author field not only for a name, but also for a specific profession or discipline. To do this, click the “Advanced search” link above the search box. In the drop-down menu next to the first search box, select “Author”. Type in a specific profession or discipline, such as homeland security, and then click Search. Our results will be limited to authors affiliated with homeland security. If we click on the title of the first result to get more information, we can see in the indexing details that one of the authors is a lead homeland security analyst for IHS.

Searching for an author’s affiliation is a useful strategy when you’re looking for articles on a particular topic. For example, maybe you want articles about evolution that are written by a geneticist, or articles about surveillance written by an author in the homeland security field. Simply add the relevant keywords to your search. It’s that simple.

Thanks for watching!