Author and Affiliation Searching

Last updated September 2008 by Mick Draper

The Databases tab

The Catalogue

Right click here to open PubMed in a new window

Author Searching
Full details of author searching on PubMed are available in the document Authorship in MEDLINE.

Personal Authors
Since 2000 there are no limits on the number of personal authors indexed in PubMed as long as the names are in Roman script.
There were limits up to 1999 and details of these limits are available in Authorship in Medline.

PubMed will interpret a search for a group of letters followed by a space, followed by one or two letters, as an author search.

PubMed automatically truncates the authors' names.
The search above will find all authors with the surname Wittert and first initial G.
You can make your searches more specific by adding extra initials, or whole names such as

wittert gary a

To prevent truncation of an author's name you can enclose the name in double quotes and add the field tag [au]

While using a fuller version of an author's name and preventing truncation will remove some irrelevant citations, it may also remove genuine citations, such as this citation where the author is given as Spencer A.

If an author has a common surname you might have to combine searching by author and address.

Corporate Authors
The best way to search for group authors is to enter the name of the group enclosed in double quotes.

To search specifically for the group as an author add the tag [cn]

Leave out a, an, or the if it's the first word of the group name.
Don't include the field tag [au].

Your results are displayed in Summary format.

To change the format of the display, click on the display box and then on the format you want.

Collaborators
To find collaborators who were not authors view the results of your search in AbstractPlus format.

Click on the Collaborators link.

Adelaide Research & Scholarship will add these people to the records for the research publication but not as authors.

Once you find an article where a particular person is an author or a collaborator you should then find most of their other articles by clicking on their hyperlinked (underlined) name.

This will find Tilley, W or Tilley, WD anywhere in a citation.
The search above found 115 citations in Sept 2008.

Scopus
Scopus is a large database that they claim includes all the PubMed citations from 1996 onwards, with the exception that the most recent citations may not yet be included.
Scopus also includes other citations that never get into PubMed.
While Scopus is more comprehensive you should keep in mind that it's not nearly as up to date as PubMed.

Scopus is available from the same places as PubMed
Library home
Databases tab
Catalogue

Or right click on the link below,
then click open in new window.

Right click here to get Scopus in a new window

Click on Author Search

Scopus will produce a result that lists all the authors with this name that it can find.
For this search 14 authors are listed and I think all but one of them is Guy Maddern.

Scopus groups authors with the same name or similar names together based on affiliation, coauthors, subject matter etc.
In this case most of the citations to articles by this author are grouped together, but there are a dozen other citations that aren't included.

Scopus uses an author identifier to differentiate between authors who have similar names.
You can use this author identifier to search for a specific author no matter what form of name they use in different publications.

Click on Details to find this author identifier and other details of the author.

If you are sure that the other links to Maddern, G. as an author are for the same bloke, then you could ask Prof Maddern to tell Scopus about this and have these citations moved to join the other 293.

To do this click on Feedback.

Professor Maddern would need to register a user name and password.
If he has a user name and password for ScienceDirect he can use this immediately.
Once logged in he can tell Scopus which citations belong to him.

The help screens for Scopus say that you can search for Author ID using Basic Search, Author Search, or Advanced Search.
I can make this work using Advanced Search only.

Copy the Author ID 7102148794
Click on the Search Tab

Click on Advanced Search.
Scroll down the list of Codes and double click on AU-ID.

Scopus will produce a set of brackets in the Advanced Search box.
Paste the author id inside the brackets and click on search.

Scopus will produce a list of citations by this author and include the number of times other articles in the Scopus database cite each of these articles. Scopus also provides a link to information about the citing articles.

Corporate Authors
The code for searching corporate authors in Scopus is authcollab.

Informit Health formerly Australasian Medical Index/AustHealth
These databases index Australian journal articles of interest to humans and some overseas articles written by Australians or about Australia.

Access to Australasian medical index and AustHealth is available through the catalogue and the databases sites.
Right click on the link below then click on open in a new window.

Right click here to open AustHealth in a new window

Click on the Search button to get the results.

Some of these AustHealth citations might not be in either PubMed or Scopus.

Author Searching in Web of Knowledge

Right click here to get Web of Knowledge in a new window

In Web of Science, Current Contents Connect, Biosis Previews etc the form of a personal author search is best done as last name>space>first initial>asterisk.
Always check the Help files for info on how to search for unusual names (hyphenated, containing spaces etc)

This form of the name will find
Norman, R,
Norman, Robert,
Norman RJ,
Norman Robert J, among others

Corporate Authors
Are searched the same way as authors.
If AND, OR, NOT or SAME are part of the corporate name then search on some part of the name that doesn't include these words or combine two or more parts of the corporate name using a logical AND.

Affiliation Searching in PubMed

PubMed is supposed to include the affiliation of the first author only.

Your search could be

(university of adelaide[ad] OR adelaide university[ad]) AND anaesthesia[ad]

Notice that I've put round brackets around the two names of the Uni.
Avoid using words such as faculty, school, discipline or department if possible

To view citations that include the first author's address you need to change the display to Abstract or AbstractPlus format.

Affiliation in PubMed is dodgy.
In the example below there is no indication of Discipline or School

This is strange because the information is available in the journal.

anatomical[ad] AND adelaide[ad] will pick up some Flinders affiliations

Affiliation Searching in Scopus
Scopus has an affiliation search but it's not infallible.
It's at the institution level.
You can search for The University of Adelaide using Affiliation search, but not for The Discipline of Pathology The University of Adelaide

Use Advanced Search
Double click on the code for affiliation or type in affil(discipline name)
Click on the link to Author name or Affiliation.

In the Affiliation box type university of adelaide.
Click on the Search button.

Click in the boxes to the left of the institutional names that are appropriate
There are 2 or 3 of these
but the first one, 1. University of Adelaide is the most likely

Click on the Add to search button.

Click on the Search button.

There will still be a few irrelevant citations turning up.

Address Searches in Australasian Medical Index/AustHealth
In AustHealth or the individual databases such as AMI, enter the discipline and then click on Any field.
Scroll down the screen and click on Show all other fields.

This will increase the number of fields available for searching.
Click on Any field again and scroll down and click on Author Address (not Author Affiliation)

Now use the second search box and do the same thing but using university of adelaide as the search term.

Affiliation Searches in Web of Knowledge

Use Address from the drop down menu for the in box.

Older articles lack addresses.
Abbreviations are common and you should check both the full and abbreviated addresses.

A list of abbreviations for Web of Knowledge is here
You'll have to look through each word of the address to find the W of K abbreviation

SAME in Web of Knowledge means in the same field; in this case the Address field.

PubMed Alerts
Before you can requests alerts in PubMed you need to register with MyNCBI.
In the top right of the PubMed screen click on Register.

Complete the registration form.
Click on Sign In.

Run the search you want to use for alerts.
This might be a string of authors, or the affiliation.

Click on Save Search.

On the Save Search screen click in the radio button to the left of Yes.

You don't need to change any of the settings as far as I can tell.
Give the search a name.
Click on OK.

Scopus Alerts
After any Scopus search click on Save as Alert (or RSS) on the results screen.

If you aren't already signed in you'll have to add your user name and password at this point.
On the next screen you can change the name of the search, the frequency of alerts and the format.
Click on the Submit button.

Your Scopus searches will be saved in My Alerts where you can edit them, or view the latest results.

Australasian Medical Index/AustHealth doesn't have an alert system.

Web of Knowledge Alerts

Run your search.
Click on Search History

Click on Save History / Create Alert

You'll need to register your email address and a password.
Then give the search a name
Click in the Send Me E-mail Alerts box
Select Biblio or Biblio + Abstract alert type
Select Field Tagged format if you want to put the citations into EndNote

List of Sources

PubMed alphabetical list of journals
Full list of PubMed journals by FTP
PubMed Journals Database

Scopus list of sources

Australasian Medical Index (Meditext) sources

Journal Lists for Searchable (Web of Knowledge) Databases

h index
Is defined as Np papers by one author having at least h citations each, and the other (Np - h) papers having at most h citations each.

A scholar with an index of h has published h works each of which has been cited by others at least h times. The person may have published other works that have been cited less than h times. These works don't contribute to the h index.

In Scopus they calculate the h index under the Author Search.
Scopus includes articles published after 1995 only.

Here's the author details for Mark Nottle.

Web of Science
Here the h index will be limited to 1980- because that's the limit of our subscription.

Search by author then click on Create Citation Report.

This search works quite well because the researcher's name isn't very common.
If the academic has a common name it might be best to combine name and affiliation to make sure that you have the right person.
This means that you may need to know many affiliation addresses to cover all of a person's career.

Always check the h index result yourself. I find some of these databases aren't necessarily good at counting.

Author Finder
Another way to find citations by a particular author is to use the Author Finder.
This appears on the Search screen under the author search box in the Web of Knowledge databases
Web of Science, and Current Contents Connect

Google Scholar
You can search Google Scholar (right click for new window) for the author, e.g. nottle m
Google Scholar responds with the articles it finds by this author. If you search just by the author the citations are ordered by the number of times they are cited.
This makes it a bit easier to calculate the h index.

If you are searching for an author with a more common name you might have to include more details such as the affiliation.

When you do this the order is no longer by times cited [sigh].
However you can still use Google Scholar to look for extra citings of articles that are close to having enough cites to increase the h index. So perhaps add a string of title words from such an article to see if you can find some extra citations.

Here is an article cited only 15 times in Scopus

Google Books
A researcher might be cited in books. Books aren't covered by the other databases so well.
Search for an author in Google Books and you may find that there are extra citations of some works that will increase the h index.

For authors with common names this could be a tiresome business.

Impact Factors
Impact factors are used to rate journals. Impact factors are calculated by dividing the number of citations to articles in a journal over a two year period by the number of articles published in the same two year period.

The semi official calculation is made by Journal Citation Reports which is part of Web of Knowledge.
You can get access through Web of Knowledge and Select a Database, through the Catalogue, or

Right click here to open Journal Citation Reports in a new window

Mostly you'll want the latest impact factor for a particular journal.
Make sure that you click in the button to the left of Search for a specific journal.
Click on Submit.

There's more info about the journal available if you click on the blue text, but this is as much as you need for impact factor.

Keeping a list of publications and citation alerts
It's very useful for academics to keep a list of all their publications and to set up citation alerts on each one.

In Scopus
Click on Abstract + Refs to show the full record of an article you want to track.

On the next screen ask for an email or RSS feed of any articles that turn up in Scopus that cite this article.

In Web of Knowledge databases

You'll have to register/sign in to activate this alert.

Many publisher e-journal sites allow you to set up citation alerts on particular articles.
Oxford Journals
Sage Journals Online
ScienceDirect
SpringerLink
Wiley InterScience

When you go to the electronic record for a journal article look for links to provide citation alerts.