Library Services: Search Discovery

Discovery

• EBSCO Discovery Service is like doing a Google search in that it searches most of the library's resources.
• It is a great tool for brainstorming your paper topic and starting your research.
• The difference from Google is that it will provide access to peer reviewed articles, ebooks, and other scholarly research materials.
• The focus/refine options assist in finding the best information on your topic.
• Navigating Discovery is the same as navigating other EBSCO databases.

On MUW’s Library homepage, enter your search words into the “Search Discovery” search box. 

The name of an author, or one or two words will get you the best results.  

 Remember! 

It's not Google.

After you click search, the next page to open will show all the results from your keyword search. Notice, the number of results returned from searching for "Woman's Literature": 2,865,621

YIKES! 

Let's narrow that down to a more reasonable number.

There are many tools on the Discovery Results Page, that can help you find what you're looking for, without looking through 2 million + results. We call these tools "expanders" or "limiters"

• Expanders broaden your search
• Limiters narrow your search to more specific terms

Let's take a look at how to get a realistic number of results. 

When we apply limiters or expanders, it changes the number of results Discovery will give you. For this search, "Woman's Literature" we did the following: 

• Clicked the Full Text and Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals boxes
• Slid the Publication Date bar over to 1930
• Under Source Types we chose "Academic Journals" only
• Under Subject we chose "literature"
• Under Publication we chose "American Literature"
• Under Language we chose "English"

By applying these limiters, our final list of results was: 287 

Now that's a number we can work with.