Wilson Biographies contains the full text of the biographies from more than 100 print volumes of biographical reference books published by H. W. Wilson and other quality reference publishers. Wilson Biographies contains all of the articles from all volumes of Current Biography, the World Author Series, Nobel Prize Winners, World Artists, World Film Directors, American Reformers, and numerous biographical books on musicians and composers from throughout history.

The biographies are searchable by name, profession, title, place of origin, gender, race/ethnicity, date of birth, date of death, and keyword.

Highlighted fields are limit fields.

There is also a special subset of fields, Citation (CITN), which consists of the SJ, PS, and DE fields. Use Citation to display, print, or save only these fields for a set of records.

The AB field appears only in the Citation Record Types (DT). It contains citations for articles on the topic listed in the Citation Heading (CH) and, in many cases, abstracts for those citations. This field is not searchable. (This field is not used in Current Biography.)

The AC field contains recent biographical citations of other references about the subject. These citations include the title and author of the work, publication data and volume and page reference information.

BB Date of Birth
(a limit field)

The BB field contains the date of birth of the subject. You can search on a specific date (mar 7 1924), on a day of any year (mar 7) or on a year (1924). You may spell out the months or use the three letter abbreviations.

The BN field appears only in the Citation Record Types (DT). It lists the author, title, and publisher information for the book that is being reviewed. This field is not searchable. (This field is only used in World Authors.)

The BS field appears only in the Citation Record Types (DT). It contains a summary of the book indicated in the Citation Heading (CH). This field is not searchable. (This field is only used in World Authors.)

The BT field appears only in the Citation Record Types (DT). It contains citations for book reviews on the title listed in the Citation Heading and, in many cases, extraxts from those reviews. This field is not searchable. (This field is only used in World Authors.)

CH Citation Heading
(a limit field)

The CH field contains the headings from the Citation Record Type (DT). These are searchable as a complete phrase, and must contain the hyphens between each word. The same headings are listed at the end of the Biography articles; however, a search of these terms retrieves only the Citations record types. (Does not appear in Current Biography.)

CN Century
(a limit field))

The CN field contains the century in which an author worked. For the centuries from 8 B.C. to 1 B.C., you may type the number of the century followed by a hyphen and "bc". For the centuries from the 1st Century A.D. till the Twentieth Century, simply type the number of the century. (This field is not used in Current Biography)

The CP field contains the H.W.Wilson copyright statement. This field is constant for every record in the database.

The CR field contains the heading of the citations and abstracts from Wilson's Humanities Abstracts and Book Review Digest that appear in this database. (Does not appear in Current Biography.)

DD Date of Death
(a limit field)

The DD field contains the date of death of the subject. You can search on a specific date (Nov 8 1990), on a day of any year (nov 8) or on a year (1990). You may spell out the months or use the three letter abbreviations.

DE Descriptor
(a limit field)

The DE field combines the information from the Subject of Biography (SB), Profession (PR), and Genre (GN) fields.

GD Gender
(a limit field)

The GD indicates the gender of the biographee: m or f.

The Genre field contains the genre(s) and/or the subjects on which the biographee wrote. (Does not appear in Current Biography.)

LA Language
(a limit field)

The Language field contains the language(s) in which the author wrote.

A note indicating that there is another article on that person in the database. This does not appear in every article for which the subject of the article has more than one entry.

PL Place of Origin
(a limit field)

The PL field indicates the place of origin of the biographee. You may search by American state, Canadian province, country, continent, or region. If the term you are searching is more than one word.

The PN field contains the phonetic pronunciation of the subject's name

PR Profession
(a limit field)

The PR field contains the subject's profession(s). Multiple professions may be listed and searches for broader terms will also locate the subject.You can use the online Thesaurus to find narrower and broader profession terms. Profession is not used in World Authors.)

The PS field contains a brief description of the article. It gives the year that the article was written, the name of the book the article originally appeared in, and if the article has been updated, it gives the year of the update.

PY Publication Year
(a limit field)

The PY field indicates the publication year of the book in which the article originally appeared.

The RA field indicates the race of the biographee. You may use the following terms:

African American (people living in the United States who are black)
Black (people living anywhere in the world, including the united states, who are black)
American Indian (includes people of Inuit descent and native Hawaiians)
Asian
Hispanic
Middle Eastern
White
Multiracial

The RF field contains a list of works about the subject

so=Current Biography
so=Spanish American Authors

The SO field lists the title of the book in which the Biography or Obituary originally appeared.

sb=Toni Morrison

The SB field contains the name of the subject. Searching can be done through the index by typing last name followed by "hyphen" followed by last name and then choosing from the resulting list. Searching can also be done through the search mode by typing first name followed by last name or last name followed by first name.

The SJ field contains the name of the subject and a note listing the birth and death dates and a brief description of the person (does not appear in all records) in display format. (In obituaries, the dates and description do not appear as part of the SJ field.)

King Lear in tw
tw=King Lear

The TW field contains titles of works by the biographee. (In Current Biography, Titles are only available for articles from 1996 forward.)

The TX field contains the main body of text on the subject. The full text of the profile is included and is fully searchable. In some cases, this text could be lengthy and continue for several screens.

txi=y

The TXI field indicates that the article is full text. If it is a full text article, the field will contain the letter "y' otherwise, it will be blank. All Biography and Obituary record types are full text and will contain a "y" in this field. All Citation record types will have this field blank.

WK Works by Subject

The WK field contains a list of works by the subject. The titles listed in this section are indexed and searchable as a TW field.

The Citation is a subset of the following fields:

Article Heading (SJ)
Publication Statement (PS)
Descriptor (DE)

The Citation serves as an easy way to display, print, or save only these fields for a set of records.

Limit Fields

The limit fields listed below are specially indexed fields that have relatively few possible values. They allow you to limit your searches to records of a particular characteristic, such as profession or place of origin. You can use the indexes to see lists of these terms.

Accession Number (AN)
Century (CN)
Citation Heading (CH)
Date of Birth (BB)
Date of Death (DD)
Descriptor (DE)
Full Text Indicator (TXI)
Gender (GD)Language (LA)
Place of Origin (PL)
Profession (PR)
Publication Year (PY)
Race (RA)
Record Type (DT)
Source (SO)
Subject of Biography (SB)
Titles of Works (TW)

For example, to retrieve documents originally published in 1990, type:
1990 in py or py=1990

In addition to in and =, the following operators may be used with the PY field:

< less than,
such as py<1990

> greater than,
such as py>1991

<= less than or equal to,
such as py<=1989

>= greater than or equal to,
such as py>=1992

- within a range,
such as py=1990-1992

The following are the article types that can be searched for in the Record Type (DT) field: Biographies, Obituaries, and Citations.

Biographies can vary in length, from 500 words to over 6,000 words, but most average about 3,000 words. In addition to the biographical text, they contain a list of works by the person, and a list of additional material on the person. Also, recent citations from Biography Index and a list of headings for Citation records about that person are added to the Biographies. (The list of headings of Citations records does not appear in Current Biography.)

Obituaries are brief, usually under 750 words, overviews of the lives and careers of subjects profiled previously in Current Biography. (Obituaries do not appear in World Authors.)

Citations are citations and abstracts that have appeared in H. W. Wilson's Humanities Abstracts and Book Review Digest. A list of headings for these Citations appear at the end of the Biography records. (Citations do not appear in Current Biography.)

Searching in the Thesaurus

The online Thesaurus is a list of professions (PR) which can be used to facilitate searching in the database. This thesaurus enables you to select and search for related terms, broader terms and narrower terms. (The Thesaurus is not used in World Authors.)

1. Switch to the Thesaurus

2. Enter a term. A Permuted Index is displayed with the term you typed, or its closest equivalent, highlighted.

3. At this point, you can get term information, including related, broader, and narrower terms.

4. You can search for the term. Single Term searches for just the term you sleected; Explode searches for the selected term, plus all of its narrower terms.

Refer to the Help Index for more information on using the Thesaurus.

The following examples demonstrate how to search Wilson's Full Text Biographical Databases. These examples are not exhaustive, but do illustrate several search techniques. It is important to note that, although all examples are given in lowercase, the program is not case-sensitive; whether your search terms are entered in upper- or lower-case, the same records will be retrieved.

To find a particular person:

The easiest way to locate an article on a specific person is to use the Browse mode, which presents a list of biographees. Click on the Change button and choose the Subject of Biography (SB) field. Then type the name you are searching for, last name followed by a hyphen followed by the first name. The closest name to your match will be highlighted in an alphabetical list of names under the search input box.

You can use the Browse mode to get lists of all terms for any of the limit fields.

You may also search for a particular person from the Search mode. Type the person's name followed by the words "in ps" or type "ps=" followed by the name. Do not use any punctuation in the name.

For example:

To find all the people who fit certain criteria, such as profession (or genre in World Authors), place of origin, gender, race/ethnicity, date of birth or date of death, or any combination of the above, use the Search mode.

For example, you can search for all of the government officials from Europe by typing the following on the search line:

(NOTE: World Authors does not use the profession (PR) field)

In World Authors you could find all the African American women novelists that are profiled by typing:

(NOTE: Current Biography does not use the genre (GN) field)

Stopwords

Words of little intrinsic meaning that appear too frequently to be useful in searching text are known as "stopwords". You can not search for the following stopwords by themselves, but you can include them within phrases:

about
all
among
an
and
as
at
be
been
between
both
by
for
from
if
into
it
its
not
of
on
or
that
the
their
these
they
this
those
to
toward
upon
used
using
what
which
while
with
within

Combining Searches

Beginning a search request with an operator (and, not, or, with, near, or in) automatically combines that request with the previous one.

For instance, if the search you just completed is health care searching for and insurance will give you the same results as if you search for health care and insurance. . . Similarly, the search health care followed by the search in ci is the same as health care in ci.

Fields
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Truncation and Wildcards

You can use the truncation symbol (*) as a substitute for any string of zero or more characters in your search term. For example, the search comput* retrieves any record containing "computer", "computers", "computing", "computerworld", etc.

You can use the wildcard symbol (?) as a substitute for one character or none. For example, the search m?cdonald retrieves records containing "McDonald" or "MacDonald".

The truncation and wildcard symbols can be used anywhere in your search term, except as the first character.

Fields
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