Guides & Bibliographies

LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) Life

Introduction

LGBT Life is the premier resource to the world's literature regarding Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender issues. This database contains indexing and abstracts for articles from more than 80 LGBT-specific periodicals as well as data mined from over 1,200 other selected titles. LGBT Life was created with the assistance of the ONE Institute & Archives, and includes information relevant to the disciplines of history, politics, psychology, religion, social work, and sociology. About fifteen percent of the citations link to the full text articles. LGBT Life is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students at this web addresses:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-lgbt.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in LGBT Life is an asterisk (*). When this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command "lesbian*" will have the computer search engine look for both "lesbian" or "lesbians" or "lesbianism" and any other possible ending for that word.

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(lesbian* or wom* OR female*) AND (voter education or politic*)

The first part of this statement will find material about females. The second part will look for the phrase "voter education" or "politics or political." The AND then links the first set with the second. This might be an effective way to look for information about political activities of women's groups.

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