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Frantz: Find Biographies

What is a biography?

""A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life and the times, which is told by a different author. A biography is more than a list of impersonal facts (education, work, relationships, and death); it also portrays the subject's experience of those events.

Find Biographies

To find information on your author, do the following:

  • Go to Advanced Search
  • Enter your author as a Subject
  • Limit your search by format (Book)
  • Broaden your search, if necessary, to search Libraries Worldwide

To find information on your author, click on Person Search, which will return items that were written by that person or that contain a significant amount of information about him or her.  Remember: Several people may have the same name. There will be a way to narrow your search further once you get to this page.  Once you select the correct author, click on Biographies under the Content Type heading.

To find information on your author, click on Person Search, which will return items that were written by that person or that contain a significant amount of information about him or her.  Remember: Several people may have the same name. There will be a way to narrow your search further once you get to this page.  Once you select the correct author, click on Biographies under the Content Type heading.

To identify articles written by and about your author:

  • Use the Advanced Search and click on the down arrow next to search Anywhere and choose Person--PER;
  • Click on Look up People and enter your author's name;
  • Check off all boxes next to the names and click Add to Search, then click Search;
  • Use Narrow results by menu to better focus your results list;
  • Use the Related searches section to see other headings ProQuest uses for your author;
  • Use Check for full text to see if the article you need is in another database or in the library's collection;
  • Use interlibrary loan to request articles we do not have.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Many articles are freely available in Google Scholar. If you are on-campus, Google Scholar will show you journals that the Madigan Library pays for by using the Get It @ Madigan Library link. If you are off-campus, you can set Google Scholar to see all of Madigan Library access to full-text articles using the PDF directions below, or use our Journal Locator to find out if Penn College students have access to the journal.