Something About the Author Online brings you comprehensive online access to all volumes of Gale's award-wining reference set, Something About the Author, the main series, and Something About the Author: Autobiography Series. You'll find thousands of illustrated biographical profiles of children's authors and illustrators, all in an easy-to-use interface that is ideal for teachers, librarians, professors, students, and other researchers of children's and young adult literature. Handy features include the ability to print, e-mail, download and access content by "Inside this Entry" and "Inside this Volume."
Description from: http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/SATA_Online?locID=iulib_nw&helppg=sata_about.htm&ste=21#description on 8/15/2012
This advice will help you improve your results when using the full text search:
1. Use at least two or three search terms. By using more search terms to narrow your search, you can locate documents that fit your information needs better. The following sample results are hypothetical:
Search Terms Number of Hits War 198 War soldier 98 War soldier France 19 War soldier French prisoner 3 Note: By default, the search engine only produces results containing all of the words you specify. See Search Operators below to learn how to use the AND, OR, NOT, and proximity operators.
2. Be specific. When looking for documents about ancient Rome, enter both of those words in your search query. If you enter just Rome, your search may give you essays that discuss modern Rome or Rome, N.Y., in addition to ancient Rome.
3. Find an exact phrase with the help of the W operator. You can narrow your searches by requiring that the search terms appear as a phrase in the order that you typed them. For example, when looking for works that discuss European travel, search for these words as a phrase, European W1 travel. (It literally means find European "within 1 word of" travel.) This narrows the results from hundreds of matches to a few dozen matches, assuming the phrase typed is not too common.
4. Mix phrases and single search terms in the search box. For example, enter "ancient Rome" AND Caesar.
5. Broaden your search by using the OR operator. For example, "Great Britain" OR England. Unless you tell the search engine otherwise, it finds only those works containing all of the words specified. By using OR between search words, terms, or phrases, you'll find works that contain as few as one of the requested words. Using the OR operator will increase the number of results that are found; use OR if the search isn't finding enough works.
6. Use plural or other word endings. For example, when looking for discussions of murder, search for various forms of the word using the OR operator as the connector, e.g. murder or murders or murderer or murderous. It is also possible, depending on the desired search term, to use the truncation (or wildcard) feature to retrieve multiple forms of a word, e.g., murder*.
7. Try using synonyms for your original words. For example, enter "nervous breakdown" or "mental breakdown" or "nervous disorder" or "mental instability".
8. Check your spelling. If you type litrature instead of literature, your search won't find any matches, unless you have activated some level of fuzzy searching.
General tips from: http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/SATA_Online?locID=iulib_nw&ste=22 on 8/15/2012
