Searching By Author or Editor

This section continues to develop your ability to find known books. Here you'll learn to search by author names giving you more options when searching.

Using Summon

Click on Advanced search.

In the Written/created by box type an author's surname, a space, and the first initial, in double quotes.
Click on the Search button or press the Enter key.

 

Use the Refine your search boxes to limit your search to books.

You can then scroll through the list of books or use the sort options to list them in chronological order.

 

Using the Catalogue

Remember to click on Catalogue on the Library Home.

You can use Author in the catalogue to find a book if you know an author's (or editor's) surname and (preferably) first name (or first initial), but not the exact book title.  

Click on Author in the by box. To find books by John Kiernan,  Click in the search box and type  kiernan j Click on the Search button.

 

The catalogue will list authors and editors alphabetically with your author/editor at the top of the list (usually).

Click on the name of the author/editor whose works you want to find. This will produce a list of items by that person held by The University of Adelaide Library.

If there is a large number of books by the author you might want to sort the books by date or title.

Click on the highlighted text to see details of any of the items.

Can I find a book if I don't know the first author or first editor?

An author search in the Catalogue or Summon will work on any of the authors/editors of a book as long as there are no more than 3 authors or editors.
For books with 4 or more authors or editors knowing the first author or editor is the best way of finding the book in an Author's Name search.
 

What if the author is an organization rather than an individual?

You can search on corporate authors such as

European Organization for Caries Research

The catalogue will produce a list with your corporate author at the top if there are items by that corporate author in the Library.

In Summon you can use the Written/created by box to search for corporate authors.
Use double quotes if you are sure of the word order, but if you aren't leave out the double quotes, and include only keywords.

Go to the next section of the tutorial Searching By Keyword (use and,or, not, "")

Back to the previous section of the tutorial called Call Numbers

Back to the tutorial Table of Contents