Author searching can be difficult due to having a common name, publishing under different names throughout a career, changing scope of research and other factors. Many researchers have complete lists of their publications but you may be tasked to search for publications for various reasons.
Questions to ask when performing author searches:
- What is the correct spelling of the author’s name?
- Does (s)he use a middle initial and what is it?
- What are other name variations (s)he used in publishing?
- What are some keywords associated the author’s research? This is helpful in identifying papers written by the author in question. e.g. diabetes, melanoma, etc.
- Has this person published outside of biomedicine? (e.g. collaboration with engineers may change where an article was published
Most of the articles authored by researchers in biomedicine are indexed in PubMed or Web of Science and therefore can be found in these databases.
- In PubMed a tag can be added to an author’s name to indicate the word you typed is a name. e.g. Reed RB[author] or Reed Robyn [full author name] Try different combinations.
- In Web of Science either initials or first name last name can be searched.
