Graduate Student Guide to UMass Lowell Library Services

Another way to refine a search is to limit your search to a field. A field is an record element containing a specific type of information about a journal article. Some examples of fields are:

• title
• author
• subject or descriptor
• journal or source
• publication date
• abstract
• full-text indicator

When you want articles from a particular journal (JN psychology today.......SO journal of abnormal psychology)

1. When you want information from a specific year or range of years (PY 2000-2007)
2. When terms specified as subject headings or descriptors would be better than keywords (SU education)
3. When you want to see all the works of a particular author in the database (AU decaprio)
4. When you want to only retrieve items that appear in the title of the article ( TI text comprehension)

To find out how to do a field-specific search in a particular database, check the database's Help screens or ask a reference librarian.