Guides & Bibliographies

WorldCat Guide

Introduction

WorldCat is a listing of 55 million books, manuscripts, maps, sound recordings, web resources, journals, newspapers, magazines, and other items of intellectual content worldwide. WorldCat does not include the full-text of any item, however, sometimes there is a link to a web resource. WorldCat does sometimes include information about book chapters, the articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers. WorldCat contains records cataloged by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) member libraries, such as the UT Arlington Library, offering more than 40 million bibliographic records of items published in more than 400 languages.

WorldCat is available to current UT Arlington Faculty, and UT Arlington Students on the web at this addresses:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/fs-worldcat.cgi

Searching

The truncation symbol in WorldCat is an asterisk (*), and 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 terror* will search for the words terror, terrorism, and terrorist.

A phrase is indicated with quotation marks (" ") so that words that are surrounded by quotation marks are searched as a single string. For example, "welfare reform" will be searched as a two word phrase.

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:

(women* OR woman* or girl*) AND (contraception OR "birth control")

The first part of this statement will find material about females. The second part will look for the words "contraception" or "birth control". The AND then links the first set with the second. This should be an effective way to look for contraceptive issues facing girls and women.

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