Spelling & punctuation: The database is very sensitive to spelling variations and internal punctuation. For example, a search of “postcolonial” as a keyword will retrieve different results than “post-colonial.” British spellings, such as “colour” and “favour” will not be retrieved by the keyword searches “color” or “favor.” Use Boolean operators and/or other search strategies to retrieve these variants (see below), e.g. “postcolonial or post-colonial” or “col*r”.
Common search aids and symbols:
|
Truncation: |
Use * |
When placed at the end of a word, this expands a search term to include forms of a root word. Examples: theor* retrieves theory, theories, theoretical; performa* retrieves performance, performances, performative, performativity; novel* retrieves novel(s), novella(s), novelist(s). |
|
Alternative
spellings:
|
Use ? |
The ? represents any single character, ?? represents two characters, etc. May be used within or at the end of a word. Examples: wom?n retrieves woman, women, or womyn; theat?? retrieves theater or theatre, but not theatrical, theatricality, or other longer forms. |
|
|
Use * |
Inside a word, the * finds one or more characters. Example: behavi*r retrieves both behavior and behaviour. |
|
Boolean
operators:
|
|
Boolean operators define the relationships between words or groups of words, or between search sets. In the CSA Illumina Advanced mode, these operators are already in place and may be changed by way of drop-down menus. If you are familiar with constructing nested Boolean searches and using field codes, you may opt to create your own “Command Search.” To access this option, click on the purple tab that says “Search Tools” above the bright green bar, then click on the lighter purple tab that says “Command Search.” |
|
|
“or” |
Broadens a search to retrieve records containing any of the words it separates. |
|
|
“and” |
Narrows a search to retrieve only records containing all of the words it separates. |
|
|
“not” |
Narrows a search to retrieve records that do not contain the specific term following it. |
|
|
none |
If no operator is used, multiple words will be searched as a phrase, in the same order and with the exact spelling as they are entered. Example: “theater of the absurd” will retrieve citations in which only these four words appear and in this exact order. It is not necessary to place the phrase inside quotation marks; doing so will retrieve the same results. |
|
Nesting: |
( ) |
Group words or phrases when combining two or more Boolean phrases. Example: (gay or homosexual*) and (Gide or Proust) will retrieve all citations containing either the words gay or the root word homosexual IF they also contain either the word Gide or the word Proust. |
|
WITHIN “X” |
|
Narrow a search by specifying a proximity relationship of fewer than “X” words between the search terms. |
|
NEAR |
|
Narrow a search by specifying a proximity relationship of fewer than ten words between search terms. Caution: Because the MLA International Bibliography does not contain abstracts, there is little need to use the WITHIN and NEAR commands. In fact, using them may inadvertently cause you to lose relevant citations. |
Keywords versus Descriptors: Using a keyword search (field code KW=) generally produces more results than using the same term as a descriptor (field code DE=), because keyword searching looks for your term(s) in both the title and the descriptor fields. This may help retrieve citations with an unusual word in their titles that has not been adopted as an official descriptor (subject heading) by the database. (Example: The word “zine” has not, as of September 2008, been adopted as a Descriptor by MLA, but there were 11 documents in the bibliography with this word in the title, so a keyword search would be necessary to retrieve these citations.) On the other hand, you may retrieve irrelevant citations because not every instance of the word in document citations means what you mean by the term. (Example: searching for “gay” as a keyword will produce citations about the 18th century writer John Gay and about Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science, as well as to documents relating to gay literature.) For totally comprehensive searching, you may need to use both keywords and descriptors.
To determine whether or not a word or phrase has been used as a descriptor, use the Thesaurus. To access it, click on the purple “Search Tools” tab and, from the next screen, click on the light purple “Thesaurus” tab. You will then need to choose whether you want the “Personal Names” thesaurus, which is used to identify the exact form of either a literary author’s or scholar’s name used by the database, or the general thesaurus, used for all other terms (e.g., concepts, theories, symbols, genres, critical approaches, etc.). You then need to select whether you want the thesaurus to display alphabetically (the default display), as a rotated index (which displays each word in the thesaurus regardless of whether it is the first, second, etc. word in a phrase), or by hierarchy (which shows hierarchical relationships between terms). For example, you might use the Rotated Index to determine all the descriptors in the database that contain the word “science.” The Hierarchical Index, on the other hand, will show you broader, narrower, and related terms for the descriptor “Science Fiction.”
You may launch a search from within the thesaurus. Simply click on the boxes beside the terms you want to search, select either “and,” “or,” or “explode,” and then “Search.”
Author names. MLAIB uses Lastname, Firstname(s) order for searching the authors of the documents (articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, etc.) in the database. Because document authors may have used variations of their name in different publications, it is best to start a document author search from the Index. To do this, click on the purple Search Tools tab, click on the lighter purple “Indexes” tab, select “Author Index” in the top box, and type your author’s Last Name, First Name (or Initial). From the results, mark all variants of the name that you believe are your author, click on “Or,” and then on “Search.”
There are three additional indexes in the MLAIB: Journal Name, Language, and Publication Type. These may be used, but these three elements may also be used as part of an Advanced Search by way of the drop-down menus for field codes at the end of each search row.
