Library Service Blog

Find the information you need using Library Search

What is Library Search?

Library Search is a powerful search engine that you can use to find and access high quality academic resources. With Library Search you can find results from our book collection, our full text journals and many other sources, and return them in one integrated list that can be refined to show just the kind of resource you need.

If you find that your searches return large sets of results, try using the filters to narrow down to the most relevant information or add additional keywords!

If you find that your searches return too few results, try adding in additional keywords to describe the information you are searching for.

Quick wins when using Library Search!

• Use the filters to help narrow you search. Looking for books? Use the Books / eBooks filter.
• Not on campus? Use the Online filter to only find online resources.
• Looking for high quality academic journal articles? Use both the Articles filter and the Peer-reviewed journals filter.
• Looking for the most current information? Use the date filter and apply an appropriate date range for your subject area.

Putting this into practice!

 For example, you could be interested in researching whether honey is effective for wound healing or wound treatment or wound management. Imagine we want to find recent journal articles on this subject. This is how we can approach the search!

Step 1: Search in Library Search for – honey AND wound. On the 12^th November, we get 25,258 results. Life is too short and this is too many to sift through! Go to Step 2!

Step 2: Apply the Article filter and the peer reviewed journal filter to the search and we reduce the volume of information to 10, 552 results.

Step 3: Apply the Date filter. We went for a 10 year date range and reduced the volume of information to 6, 449 results.

Step 4: Scroll down the screen and take a look to see if there are any relevant subject heading filters that we could use to narrow the search. We then applied the Wound Healing filter and have a manageable set of 918 results!

You can see our search results here.

There are other ways we can use Library Search but that’s for another blog post! Happy searching!