The College of St. Scholastica Library Lab: Worksheet One: Searching by Corporate Author

The College of St. Scholastica Library Lab
Worksheet One: Database Searching

Searching by corporate author

Corporate authors, as opposed to personal authors, give credit for authorship of a work to a "corporate" entity,
such as –

groups:	Men as Peacekeepers
organizations:	American Cancer Society
institutions:	The College of St. Scholastica
meetings or conferences:	Spring Conference on Contemporary American Indian Issues
governments/agencies:	United States. Department of Health & Human Services

Corporate authors, especially governments, are some of the major publishers of statistical information (U.S. Department of Commerce), informational literature (American Cancer Society), and research (U.S. Centers for Disease Control).

Corporate authors, and again, especially governments, often have long, convoluted names - they are presented in a hierarchy, beginning with the largest unit of government that the author belongs to. For instance, the "full" name of the National Center for Health Statistics is the United States, Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Since a personal author search in PALS only searches the first four words of the field, it would be difficult to find works authored by the National Center for Health Statistics, since PALS could only search the first four words of the name - in this case "United States Department of."

Obviously, a search such as this would retrieve all works published by any department of the U.S. Government.
In order to get around this problem, PALS developed a keyword search in the corporate author field. Because keywording allows any words to appear anywhere in the author field in any order, works published by the National Center for Health Statistics can be retrieved, even though the name does not appear in the first four words of the field.

On PALS, select Advanced Search. From the drop-down box select Author, keyword .

1. The words of the author's name can be entered in any order.

2. Do not include words such as "the" or "of" - these will be ignored in a corporate author search (However, they are needed if you are conducting a personal author search).

Worksheet questions

Answer questions 4a. & 4b. using the "author" search from the basic search page of PALS.
a. How many items does the CSS Library own that are authored by the College of St. Scholastica?

b. How many items does the CSS Library own that are authored by the Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centres for Nursing/Midwifery?

c. Click on Advanced Search. Click on the arrow which is on the right hand side of the box which says ‘Key Word.” From the drop-down box choose “Author, keyword.” Using this search, how many items does the CSS Library own that are authored by the Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centres for Nursing/Midwifery?

d. The Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centres for Nursing/Midwifery is a unit of what larger organization?

e. What is the difference between an exact author search and a keyword author search that allowed your second search to be successful when you first was not?

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