Using the Discovery Service

Hi students, my name is Hannah Porter and I'm the Faculty Librarian for Business
and in this video, I'm going to give you an introduction to our EBSCO Discovery Service.

To get started, go to the Library website: Library.port.ac.uk and choose "Click to search Library resources" here.
The top box is our EBSCO Discovery Service.
You've got a basic search, a search for journals, and also our advanced search page.
I'm going to do a quick search for "transformational leadership". Notice that I'm putting it in quotation marks so that it looks together because I want it to find "transformational leadership" as a phrase, I don't want transformational in one section of the article and leadership elsewhere.

So now I click on Search. At this point, you'll be greeted with this screen. Do make sure that you choose "Continue personalized". That enables you to log into your own account using your University username and password, and save all of your information to your own account.

So I'm just going to log in, accept cookies and now you can see I'm in the Discovery service. To check if you're signed into your account, just click on MyEBSCO at the top here and you should see your name.

That means you're in your account and you can save everything to your personal area. If for any reason you didn't choose continue personalized, if you shut the browser and open it up again, this screen should appear for you so that you can then "continue personalized" and then you'll just use your University username and password from then on. 

So you can see that it's brought across my search and here is my list of results.
I've got some nice filters at the top here that I can apply. What you get at the top of your results is some research starters from maybe our encyclopaedias, and perhaps there might be a link to a matching University Library subject page, if that goes with your search.

A couple of things to note is that this system is just searching everything that the Library has: all of our books, ebooks, journal articles, that type of thing. So you'll only see things that the Library actually has access to.
If you scroll down, you can see that our books appear in here so you can quickly access your ebooks. You can also access the print books and place reservations, and that will take you through to our Library Catalogue.
You may still want to use our Library catalogue separately for a book search, but they are in here. 

I tend to use this system to find journal articles so quickly and easily you can just turn on full text online, which means you're just looking at the journal articles you can download and read straight away, peer reviewed, which means you're looking at those really good quality ones.

And then you can just choose past five years, past ten years, depending on your subject area, and you'll get a nice set of results. I don't worry about source type because I'm looking at peer reviewed journal articles. You'll notice the results are still quite large. That's because it's looking for your keywords everywhere, all over the document.

So we can go into the advanced search and make some changes to reduce that.
The other thing we can do is if I go into all filters here, I can also apply different things. So I might want to choose a particular subject area. You can see transformational leadership there.

One that I really like is under Content Provider. You can choose just to search within Business because Discovery is searching all of our databases and perhaps you just want transformational leadership in our business journals. I'm going to apply that for now. So now I've got 4000 results.

If I go into the advanced search, I can build a search in here. And I can also choose where my words are appearing. So I could look for transformational leadership just in the title, for example. That would give me fewer results. If I want to build a more comprehensive search, say I want to look for things around, recruitment and talent management.

I could pop "talent management" in OR "managing talent" because the perfect journal article might use either terms. So I'm putting that in the top box linked with OR with my quotations around it for those phrases. And I said I wanted something on recruitment so I might type in recruitment OR retention because again, those words could mean similar things. Another trick is to take off the end of a word and put an asterisk if you want to find alternative endings.

So recruitment might also be referred to as recruit recruiting recruits or recruitment.
So I put recruit with an asterisk to find all of those endings. Retention. There aren't any other endings, so I haven't put that there. And notice no quotation marks because these are single words. So you put the concept going down linked by AND your alternative words going across, linked by OR. And you can choose where you want those words to appear. So let's quickly do a search.

And now I've got slightly fewer results. So let's have a quick look at the results screen. You can see various subjects here. These can be helpful to to give you ideas for what you can search on. And you can restrict your search just to subject terms for each article. It should tell you where it's published. And the authors. If you want to read the abstract, just click on Show more and you can see where your terms are appearing in the abstract.

To access the full text of the article, there are different options available. So you see this Access options. Sometimes the system will have a PDF and an online version - if you click on PDF it will take you into the PDF and you can download with various other options here. However, not all of our articles are actually in the Discovery service. So for example, this one here, this says access now.

And if I click on it that's actually going to take me out into a different provider.
You click Access through your institution, sign in and then you can download the article from here. So some things are in EBSCO. Some things are in external providers. But everything is subscribed to by the Library. Now you can also do a whole load of really nice saving things. So if you see any articles that you like, just simply click on this bookmark item here and then they will go into your saved options over on your dashboard.

You can also quickly grab a citation. If I click on that Cite button. Choose APA 7th, copy to clipboard. There's my basic reference. Do check it against Library guidance, but they're usually quite good for journal articles. Also, under the three dots we have the Share option. Sometimes there might not be what's called a DOI link in your reference, and if so, you want to use this link instead.

So you can copy that. And that will always give you a link back to this screen. Final thing under here that's really nice is the Add to project option. So if you choose that, you can choose a particular project. So you could create a new project or I've already got one here on leadership. So I can select that and Add now. And it will then either create your project and add your article in, or just add your article into your project. All of your saved things can be found on the side here. So all of your Projects, your Saved articles and everything else. You can also save searches if you want to - so you can view your Searches under here and save them.
And your Projects are here. So those are just like folders. So you can have a look within those as well.

So really nice options for saving everything. So other things on the side here, you can begin your new search. You can look in a publication, you can have a look for a concept and then see what other the concepts linked to it in a sort of pictographic format. So that might be helpful. Just remember that this is a dynamic system.
So there will be lots and lots of updates. So I'm only showing you the basic things - if new things pop up have an explore and see how they work. So I hope you really enjoy using the system.

Remember, check that you're signed in each time and then use your dashboard to save everything. Do your quick search at the top here or or go into New search and Advanced if you want to build a more comprehensive search.
If you have any questions and queries about using the system, do get in touch with us through the Library 24/7 online chat.

This tutorial demonstrates the features of Concept Map. The Concept Map gives researchers a visual way to interact with their searches while also exploring additional related topics.