Probably the most obvious are the Author and Named Person fields. But every host and each database has its own cut on how these fields are defined and labeled. BY indicates Byline while AU indicates Author. In Data-Star, authors are placed in the AU field as bound phrases. The hyphens are very important in this search since without them you get 0 hits.
Truncation is a good idea.
Then using the ROOT command is the only way to begin the search. Watch for upcoming changes to this file structure, however. You will find little standardization of people's names in online databases. If you search NAM and find Doe, John H., you can be reasonably assured that a personal name search for Doe, John H. will actually retrieve all the records where Mr. Doe's name appears as a personal name subject descriptor. NewsNet has no field for author, making an author search very difficult.