Use the links below to learn how to find information about an author.
In many cases, you'll find information about the university, company, etc. that an author is affiliated with on the first page of an article's PDF:
In some cases, you'll also find biographical information on the last page of an article's PDF:
To search the free web for information about an author, you can use a search engine like Google or Bing. Be sure to put an author's name between quotation marks to help ensure that you'll find information about the correct author. (You may have to try different variations of the author's name, too -- with and without a middle initial, for example.)
If you're searching for information about an author with a common name, it may help to add the name of the university, company, etc. with which the author is or has been affiliated. You could also try searching for the organization's website and then, once you've found it, searching that website for information about the author.
The image below shows a Bing search for information about Ken Hultman, the author of the article shown in the previous section. Since the author has a relatively common name, the phrase "organization development" (Hultman's area of expertise, per the biographical information included in the article shown in the previous section) was also added to the search to help ensure that search results are for the correct author:
Your search results should include links that you can use to find more information about the author. In this case, results include a link to the author's personal website:
Search results for contemporary authors may also include a link to an author's LinkedIn profile, which may also provide useful information about the author:
To the extent possible, it's a good idea to search for confirmation of the information that you find on the free web, so that you can ensure its accuracy.
Once you've opened up an article's record in a UMGC Library database, clicking on an author's hyperlinked name will run a search that will retrieve other documents that the author has written that are indexed by the database that you're searching:
Keep in mind that different databases contain information for different publications, so if you need a comprehensive list of an author's publications, it's a good idea to search multiple databases. (There is no single database that you can search to find a complete list of all of an author's publications.)
Most databases will allow you to search by author (that is, you can enter an author's name into a search box and then use the drop-down menu next to the search box to select the "author" option). Note, though, that the exact format of how the author's name should be entered will vary by database and so it's a good idea to check the "help" or "search tips" page of a database for information about how a particular author's name should be entered in the database in order to find documents written by that author.
To search for books that an author may have written, you can use the Library catalog. Enter an author's last name, followed by a comma and then his or her first name and then use the drop-down menu to select author beginning with:
You can use the UMGC Library's Scopus database to find information about an author, including the number of times the author's works have been cited and the author's h-index (a rough measure of an author's influence, based on the total number of documents the author has written and on the number of times those documents have been cited).
Once in the database, click on the Authors link above the search boxes and enter information about the author in the search boxes, as shown in the image below:
On the search results page, click on the author's name to be taken to a page that contains the author's h-index and publication information, etc., as shown in the image below:
If you have any questions about this information, please use the UMGC Library's Ask a Librarian service to receive assistance.