The Discovery Service

What is the Discovery Service?

The Discovery Service is a search engine to help you find articles, books, journals and other academic resources.

How do I use the Discovery Service? 

More information on using the Discovery Service can be found here

What’s in it?

The Discovery Service searches many library resources in one go. Finding items from the Library Catalogue and over 100 databases, it presents you with one result list of journal articles, conference papers, books, ebooks and more.

You can use the Discovery Service either by clicking on the 'Search Library resources' button at the top right of this page or by going to the  Discovery Service home page. To access from your workplace or another institution, you may need to use this off-campus link.

By default, Discovery will only return results for items that are available at University of Portsmouth, either online or physically in the library.

If you would like to search more widely, you can click to remove the “Available in Library Collection” limiter on the search results screen, or start your search from the Advanced Search screen. This will include results for a wider range of items, some of which won’t be immediately available to you. Our Inter Library Loan service can help you get hold of them.

By default, Discovery will search all subject areas. However you can also use a version of Discovery with a subset of resources tailored to better match specific subject areas:

Comments and Feedback

Please do let us know of any issues or suggestions for improvements to the service. Just send an email with specifics of the search or link you were using to the library email: library@port.ac.uk