The CSA Illumina search screen consists of 3 rows of boxes that allow for customized searches. (More rows can be added by clicking the “Add Row” link in the upper right corner.) Each row has 3 boxes for synonymous search terms (connected by “or”) and a fourth box for selecting the desired field of data. It defaults (at UCSD) to Keyword; use the drop-down arrow to change to title, author, journal name, etc. Starting with row 2, each row is proceeded by an operator box.
You may type a multi-word phrase within a box, for example “short story” or “theat* of the absurd.” The search will look for those words only in the order in which you type them. It is not necessary to place quotation marks around your phrases, as it is in some databases.
Use synonyms, variants of a term, or a group of related concepts within the same row of boxes if you want to retrieve citations with any of the terms. For example, you might put “novel*,” “short stor*,” and “fiction” in the three boxes of one row if you are interested in seeing citations that contain any of those terms.
To combine concepts or to search in more than one field, use additional rows. The default Boolean operator is “and,” but you may change this to either “or” or “not” from the pull-down arrow to the right of the operator box. Add rows if necessary.
Rows may also be used to limit your search in a variety of ways. Some of these are: author or editor (i.e., the author or editor of the book or article, not your subject author), source (i.e., journal title), language, year of publication, monograph title, publisher, location of publisher, type of publication, and journal volume number.
Note: “Keyword” is not the same as a subject search. See Search Tips for more details.
Below these basic customizable search boxes are several boxes that allow you to limit your search in several common ways: by date of publication, to journal articles only, to English language citations only, and to the latest update of the bibliography.
Finally, CSA Illumina has recently added fixed search boxes for most of the available fields of data. You may use as many or few as you wish (or none, if you use the boxes at the top). The difference with these is that each has a link to an alphabetical Browse, which you may use to locate acceptable terms within that field of data. There are also some useful boxes that allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed articles and/or to journals in the JSTOR database.
Caution: Many of the older citations in the MLA International Bibliography database—particularly those entered before 1981—are not fully coded in terms of language, publication type, literary genre, or literary time period; they also may have minimal descriptors (subject headings)—sometimes only one very broad descriptor. Therefore, applying limits may cause you to lose references to some relevant documents. Example: If you are searching for citations about George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch, and use “Eliot” and “Middlemarch” as keywords, it is probably unnecessary to further limit your search by genre (e.g., novel) or literary time period (e.g., 1800-1899). As of September 2008, there were 147 citations with these two keywords published between “earliest” and 1980; if the limit “Novel” is added in the genre box, however, only 41 citations remain and if “Fiction” is added as a genre, only 2 citations appear!
