L'Année Philologique  

L'Année philologique is the most comprehensive index to scholarly work in Classical Studies.  The online version of L'Année Philologique includes references and abstracts to journal articles, books, and conferences.

Search options

L’Année philologique has six search options at the top of the screen: 'Modern author,' 'Full text', 'Ancient authors,' 'Subjects and disciplines,' 'Date,' and 'Other criteria'.

Modern author search
Because author names may appear in various ways - with first or middle names, or only initials - it's safest to search only the last name.  On the next screen, check the box next to the correct author and click Confirm the selection. Sometimes authors are included under various versions of their names (e.g. given name and family name, initials and family name), so you might need to check more than one box.

Full text search
Full text search is the best option for finding articles on a particular topic, but  "Full Text" does not search the complete text of articles.  :( Instead, this option searches only abstracts and citations (e.g. author, article title, journal title etc.).

If you enter more than one word, the words won't be searched as a phrase, but all must appear somewhere in the record. For example, if you were interested in the relationship between the ancient calendar and festivals, you could enter: calendar festival.

If you search using English terms, the references matched are likely to be in English.

Ancient authors
If you searching by "Ancient Author," your search results will find include works by the author (new translations, editions, or commentaries) and works about him.

There are some quirks in the "Ancient authors" search. When searching for ancient authors' names in their Latin form, you'll see that 'v' appears as 'u' unless the name starts with 'V.'  (For example: 'Liuius' rather than 'Livius' and 'Ouid' rather than 'Ovid') In most cases, you can use modern English spelling for ancient authors’ names, but if your search produces no results try an alternative spelling. For example, 'Vergil' produces no results; so try either 'Virgil' or 'Virgilius'.

Subjects and disciplines
This option lets you browse L’Année philologique by broad subject areas:

• Literary history
• Linguistics and philology
• Textual history
• Antiquities
• History 
• Law
• Philosophy and the history of ideas
• Science, technology, crafts
• The classical tradition
• Festschriften and collections

Each of subject areas can then be broken down into sub-categories and even sub sub-categories.

Date 
You can search for articles published in, before or after a given year, or within a particular date range.

Other criteria
This option allows you to search within specific fields:

• Word(s) in the title
• Publisher
• Collection
• Periodical
• Language
• APh number. This is the number assigned to each bibliographic record within L’Année Philologique. It must be in the format VV-NNNNN (i.e. volume, number).Search
• Reviews by periodical
• Reviews by author.

Truncation

Use an asterisk * to replace a letter or letters at the end of your search term. For example, if you enter rom* as a search term, your search results will include results with the words Rome, Roman, Romans, etc.

Combining Searches

Suppose you have searched for Petronius and received 2,000 search results--you'll probably want to narrow your topic.  For this example, you could decided to limit your search to articles that discuss Petronius's Satyricon by clicking "Full Text" and entering "Satyricon" in the box provided.  Your next Result Screen will include the two searches you have done.  Click the combine button.  On the next screen, enter Q1 AND Q2 and click the search button"  You'll will then have a list of articles dealing with Petronius and Satyricon. 

   Q1 and Q2   (stands for Query 1 and Query 2)

You could also limit your search results by selecting a language and then combining those results.  Or you could select one of the subject or disciplines or a date range.

Interpreting the Results

Results are listed in chronological order, with the oldest references first. To find more detail on an article or book chapter, click on the open book icon to the right.

Journal references are typically abbreviated. In the full display, hovering over the abbreviation will often pop-up the full journal title. However, if pop-ups do not appear, you can find the full journal title by searching under Other Criteria - Periodical. For example, a search on CJ would show it to be The Classical Journal.

This guide is based upon a pages created by Vanderbilt University Library and the University of Melbourne.