Virginia Bibliography - General Help

The online bibliography searches a database of more than 350 reports published by the Virginia District. The product of a successful search is a list of one or more reports in bibliographic format.

This page gives general tips and guidelines on how to search more productively.

Author

You may initiate an author search by entering their name in the search box or by scrolling through the list and clicking on the author's name. The list is a comprehensive list of all authors and/or co-authors in the publications database, some of whom were not affiliated with the USGS. If you type the author's name, case is unimportant but punctuation is. Therefore, it is best to only search on the author's last name. If the author has a common last name, it would be best to select their name from the list. Also, the system does not differentiate between fields. For example, if you enter "Loudoun," you will generate a listing that includes all reports for Loudoun County plus all reports written by any authors named Loudoun. If the search generated unexpected results, it may be better to use the list.

Keyword

The list of keywords is based on a standard water thesaurus. If you are interested in something specific to Virginia, use the search box. While each report has an associated list of keywords, the search mechanism does not distinguish between fields. For example, if you enter "Loudoun," you will generate a listing that includes all reports for Loudoun County plus all reports written by any authors named Loudoun. If this happens, you may want to qualify your search with related terms such as 'formation' or 'county.' When entering terms, case is unimportant but spacing and punctuation is. The search mechanism is completely text based and does not support any boolean search strategies (using 'and', 'or', or 'not' conditions)

	Return to the Virginia Online Bibliography home page.
Contact: GS-W-VArmd_webmaster@usgs.gov U.S. Department of Interior, U.S. Geological Survey Privacy Statement Disclaimer Last modified: 04/19/05 11:57:42 AM URL://va.water.usgs.gov/bib/bib/help_va.html