SOLO Tip: Finding a Specific Edition of a Work

Need to find a copy of a popular text, but are struggling to find the one with a specific editor or introduction? The English and Film Studies Subject Librarian, Helen Scott, has put together a handy-dandy how-to guide to help you navigate this on SOLO!


Use ‘Sort & Filter’ options in SOLO to locate a specific edition of a work.

Example: looking for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, edited by Edward Copeland (Cambridge University Press)

Search SOLO for brief details, including the editor’s name, eg: ‘austen sense copeland’:

A SOLO screenshot of someone searching for 'austen sense copeland', with the filter set to 'Oxford Collections'

Note: The filter is set to ‘Oxford Collections’

Limiting the search to ‘Oxford Collections’ can help to make your search more targeted (but is only appropriate when searching for books, not when searching for articles).

The search results will show a ‘cluster’ of the different editions of Sense and Sensibility, with the edition you are looking for highlighted:

A SOLO screenshot of a search result for Sense and Sensibility - a copy with 88 versions

Note: The 88 versions of the title have been clustered together into one search result

Click on the title, to open up the cluster of 88 versions. The default will be date order, with the most recently published at the top. To find the Copeland edition, use the ‘Sort & Filter Results’ menu on the left-hand side, and open up the ‘Author/Creator’ options:

A SOLO screenshot of the clustered item opened to show all 88 results individually.

Note: You can filter the clustered results by ‘Author/Creator’ on the left hand side.

Click on the editor you are looking for and this will narrow the results accordingly:

A screenshot of the newly updated SOLO search results, now only showing the copies edited by Edward Copeland

Note: Now that the filter has been applied, only the copies edited by Edward Copeland are shown

By Helen Scott, English and Film Studies Subject Librarian

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