button.Table of Contents: |
Tomasz Neugebauer
GLIS 616 ATLA Religion Database Guide created: 15 March 2004 last updated: 07 October 2005 |
1. Go to http://gateway1.ovid.com
2. Click on the
button.
3. You should now be at the OVID Choose a database
page. Scroll to find
and click on
the name. (note: clicking on the
opens a page of
detailed information about the database, including a list of fields)
The ATLA Religion Database, produced by the American Theological Library Association (http://www.atla.com/), covers such topics as Biblical studies, world religions, Church history, and religious perspectives on social issues. The database consists of more than 1,100,000 records (index citations, journal articles, essays, book reviews) covering the research literature of religion in over 30 languages from 1,400 international journals and 14,000 multi-author works in and related to the field of religion. The full file covers data from 1949 to the present.
)There are three main input components on the interface: Keywords, Author and Limit to.
 |
In the example (above), clicking
 would return all citations where: the author is 'krishnamurti' and the citation contains the keyword 'nature' (in the abstract, title, related work title, heading words, chapter titles or essay contents), and the language of the document is
English. The
Limit to was used by activating the checkbox next to the limit that we want to impose: 'English Language'. To search with Keywords
or Author field only leave the other field blank. |
| Any number of keywords and/or authors names can be entered, separated by
logical operators AND, OR, NOT. (note: this system is not case
sensitive, including the logical operators)
There is no predefined order of precedence for the operators: they are processed "left-to-right". Therefore, when using multiple logical operators, use parentheses to establish logical order of operations. A common usage of the OR operator is to retrieve synonyms of a word (e.g.: meditation OR prayer), and a common usage of AND is to retrieve citations that need to contain more than a single keyword (e.g.: Torah AND Abraham). |
| Use unlimited truncation by attaching a '$' to a word stem
(e.g.: 'meditat'), and instructing
the system to retrieve all words that begin with the given stem. For example:
|
in the
upper-right of interface opens an OVID help page on searching.
)All of the functionality described above for Basic Mode Searching can be used in advanced mode.
Advanced mode searching keeps track of the
different search sets created during a session. The sets can be combined (
) like keywords, using AND, OR, NOT.
For example,
after set 1 and 2 was created, set 3 (below) was created by typing:
|
|
| The resulting set 3 contains citations with (charity or benevolence or generosity) AND (maimonides or rambam). |
 |
The same Limit to as in Basic Searching is available.
In addition, a separate interface is available (
 )
which offers the option of limiting created sets by various languages and
publication types: Clicking
on
once the limits and sets to be limited have been selected brings you back to the
main search interface with the new limited sets created. |
 |
Clicking on
 searches
for the entered terms in the Title (of the article, book, essay, issue,
review, or serial) fields of citations. |
Clicking on
searches for the entered terms in the Journal Name fields of citations. |
Clicking on
 activates author searching.
For example, entering 'john paul' in the 'Enter the Author's last
name, a space, and first initial if known' input box will display the Authors Index starting with your search
term .
To perform the search check the exact name or names in the authors' index that you want search for. Clicking on
|
|
To search by a specific field use the
button,
which opens an interface to search by or consult the index of any
field, such as scripture passage, abstract, book title, language, year,
subject heading.
In Basic Mode Searching, the results are shown by clicking on "Perform
Search". Citation and Abstract is displayed by default for each
record.
You can click on
or
for
each record .
Use the
button to scroll through the found records. The Citation Manager interface is used to modify
the display of listed citations.
For example, select
citations, change the Fields radio box to
,
and click on
to view the complete reference of all records currently displayed.
In Advanced Mode Searching, the most current results are
displayed below the search interface (just scroll down). To
see the results for a particular set, click on
in the list of sets. You can also change display with
. |
 |
will
retrieve all citations that contain the keywords that begin with 'meditat' (such
as meditation, meditations, meditating, meditate) or 'pray'(such as prayer,
praying, prayers). 
in the
example (right) will bring you back to the main search page, with a newly created
set containing all citations where the author field is John Paul I Pope,
or John Paul II Pope. 
field,
and click on
to
expand the index of subject heading terms, starting with "Bible".
allows you to look up the Classification Codes that represent broad subject categories within ATLA.
Searching on the codes is a convenient way to subset the database into
subject area sets