Academic type question

[chickenfeet]

Suppose one wishes to know whether books or articles written by person x are cited in the bibliography of work y. Suppose further that, in the discipline in question, most works are of group authorship. Is there a way of doing this short of ploughing through the bibliography line by line?

Just to make matters more fun, as far as I can see, authors of a given paper tend to be listed alphabetically and the person I'm interested in has a surname starting with 'Z'.

Comments

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I think some of the academic databases I used during my most recent studies - a couple of years ago - would search by author, regardless of where they were in the list of authors.

On the other hand, this seems obvious so you've probably tried it already.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I'm working with a particularly primitive piece of technology called, I believe, a 'book'.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Heh!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

If the books in question are listed on Amazon, 'search inside' could be your friend.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Regrettably 'search inside' is not enabled for the book in question. Great idea though.

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

If academic databases are out of the question, and the bibliography is long enough to make it worth it, how about scanning/OCR and then searching the resulting document (perhaps searching for just substrings of the name you're looking for)?

[forthright.livejournal.com]

For books listed in Google Book Search it would certainly be possible to search the bibliography for all instances of a particular name.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I don't know of one, unfortunately, aside from knowing who x's most common co-authors are. And even that doesn't help when bibliographies are ordered by citation place, not by alpha.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

You could try a search for the author in question's CV. It's unlikely any academic would miss out any credit s/he was due.