Using the Discovery Service

Hi students, my name is Hannah Porter and I'm the Faculty Librarian for Business and Law 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. On the library homepage, use this blue Search Library Resources button that will take you into our search page.

On our search page. You want to use the top box here for the Discovery service. You've got your basic search. You've got a search to find out which journals we subscribe to, and you've got the option for an advanced search. I'm just going to do a basic search for transformational leadership. Now you'll notice that I've put transformational leadership in quotation marks. So, it searches together as a phrase. That's because I don't want transformation in one sentence and leadership in another. So, I want transformational leadership together. Now click on search. Do make sure that you choose continue personalized as this enables you to log into your own account using your university username and password and save all of the information to your own space.

And now you can see I'm in the Discovery service in my own account. Look for your name and here you will find your menu where all your saved items will be. 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 you can then continue personalized and you'll just use your University username and password from then on, so you can see that it's brought my search across. And here is my list of results. I've got some nice filters at the top here that I can apply. Also, at the top of the results you get some research starters from other encyclopedias, or maybe a link to a relevant subject page. A couple of things to note is that this system is just searching everything the library has, all of our books, ebooks, journal articles, that type of thing.

So, you'll only see things that a library actually has access to. If you scroll down, you'll see that our books appear in here so you can quickly access your ebooks or get taken through to the library catalogue so that you can reserve items. You may still want to use our library catalogue separately for a book search, but the books do appear in here.

I tend to use this search mainly for journal articles, so quickly and easily you can just turn on full text online, which means you're just looking at journal articles that you have access to download and read straight away. And then peer reviewed journal articles, 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 here because I've turned on peer reviewed journal articles. You'll notice that the results are quite large. That's because it's looking for your keywords everywhere, all over the document. So, we could go into the advanced search and make some changes to that. Or we can start looking at our filters. So, if I click on all filters here you can see the different options. So, subject can be really quite helpful. I might want to turn on transformational leadership here. That will reduce my results. One that I really like is on the content provider where you can choose to limit your results to just business. I'm going to apply that one for now and I've got 11,000 results.

If you still have too many results and they're not what you want, try this AI assisted search. Let's enter a question. How does transformational leadership affect employees? And we’ll turn on AI assisted search. Here the database is looking at your question and deciding which keywords to use, which can be a really good help. Click on Show Refine Query and you'll see what it's done. So, it's put in alternative words for transformative leadership and alternative words for employees like workers or staff.

Sometimes, though, even with this, you might not get what you want, so you can always turn it off and go into the advanced search and build something comprehensive. So, if I go back to transformational leadership, I can choose where my words appear. So, I might want to look just in the title. That would be a much narrower search. If I want to build a more comprehensive search, say I want to look for things around recruitment and talent management. I can put in talent management add an OR and put an alternative word like managing talent. Remember, like the AI search did because the perfect journal article might use either terms. So, I'm putting that in the top box linked with OR.

And then in the next box down I said I wanted something on recruitment. So, I can type that in. But I can also put a little asterisk on the end because that will find recruit recruiting or recruitment. It finds all endings of the words, so that can be useful to you. Another word for recruitment or a similar idea might be retention. So, I can pop that in as well. And notice there's no quotation marks around these two words, because the individual words, you just use the quotation marks to keep two or more words together. So, let's quickly do a search on that. So slightly fewer results. If you have a look through the list of results, it should tell you where the article is published, in which journal, and also who the authors are, as well as the date.

To decide if the article is relevant have a look at the various subjects here. These can also be useful to give you ideas of what you can search on. Other ways to assess relevancy. You can read the summary here, but you can also use the AI insights option. This is a really helpful AI summary, so you can assess whether the article is what you want. You may also see a button here that says ask this document or an AI asked. All that will allow you to interact with the full text of the article using AI, and ask questions, which is really helpful. But remember, you do still need to look and read the actual article because for your assessments, you shouldn't be citing any AI generated content. Use the AI to help you find it. Summarize, but always go back to the original source to check, quote, paraphrase, and reference materials correctly.

Now to access the full text of the article, you've got access now. You may also see a couple of other options. If it's got different formats available like PDF or online. Now just note that not all of our articles are actually available within the Discovery service. So sometimes you might see things that say locate full text or access. Now. These will likely take you out to a different provider where you can access the article. So, the Discovery system knows we have the article. It's just linking out to the right place to get it. Click on access to your institution and sign in and then you'll be able to read the article.

So just be aware that some things are contained within Ebsco while some things are in external providers. But everything is subscribed to by the library. Now you can also do some really good things around saving articles. So, if you find one you really like, you can quickly just bookmark it here. And then if you go up to your name at the top, anything you've bookmarked will appear here in your saved option.

You can also quickly grab a citation. So, click on the three dots and then cite. Make sure it says APA and copy to clipboard. And that's my basic reference. Do check it against the library guidance though. They're usually quite good for journal articles, but it does need a double check. Also, under the three dots we have the share item. Sometimes there might not be what's called a DOI link in your reference. And if so, you'll want to create a link so that you can use this one instead. So, you can copy that and it will always give you a link back to this screen.

The final thing that's under here is add to project. So, if I choose that, you can choose a particular project like a folder to add this into, or you can create a new project. And again, all of these can be found up the top under your name. You've got your projects and your saved options. So really good and easy for keeping hold of everything. And just remember this is a dynamic system then so there are often new updates. So if you notice any new buttons or options just have an explore and see how it all works.

So I hope you find some really great results using Ebsco Discovery. And remember, there's lots of different ways to search. Check that you're signed in each time and save all of your results. If you have any questions or 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.