OneSearch, the new library system, allows you to search our collection of electronic resources – including academic journals, databases, audio visual resources, maps and newspapers. You can find it on the library homepage.
How should I search?
The electronic resources in OneSearch consist of a number of databases and each database contains different journals (or videos, newspapers, images etc). You can search for information in a number of different ways.
The first option is to use the search box in OneSearch (as shown below) by putting in a topic or keywords (or the full title of an article if you already know what you are looking for). You can opt to search for ‘articles’ or ‘everything’ (however this will also search for books). This method will search our entire collection of electronic resources, so be aware that you may end up with a lot of results and need to filter them or narrow the search.
You may prefer to search using an individual database, such as Science Direct or SportDiscus, which you can find from the A-Z of Library Databases on the OneSearch homepage. The benefit of this is that it will only be searching a limited number of journals and they should be the ones that are most relevant to your subject. You also have more options for using additional keywords or search terms and it is often easier to filter results. For an idea of which databases are most relevant to your subject, see this post.
Searching in a database – SPORTDiscus
Finally, if you have been asked to look at a particular journal or you find that a lot of results are coming from one title in particular, you may prefer to go straight to that journal, for example the British Journal of Sports Medicine. You can do this by selecting ‘find a journal’ in OneSearch and entering the title of the journal. Doing this will allow you to browse current or past editions of the journal, or to search for articles only within this journal. More instructions are available here
