Searching Discover

The Discovery service, or "Discover search," is a search tool that searches most of what TRU Library has available, rather than you searching multiple databases individually. It's a great place to start your research.

Start your search in the box at the top of this guide, or find it on the TRU Library homepage:

Library research assistance is available:

1. Email library@tru.ca
2. Use AskAway chat service (orange box on right of homepage)
3. Book an appointment with a librarian (via video conference)
4. Use other research guides

Searching works best using keywords: what are one or two main ideas of your topic? Enter those into the search bar and click Search.

For example, your search might be forest fires Canada:

A. Look at your search results.

The title of each result is the link to get further information about the resource (see section "looking at individual items"). For now, look at these titles to get a sense of what resources you have found.

B. Are your search results relevant?

Sometimes a keyword search retrieves articles that contain your keywords, but are not relevant to your topic. Tips for improving your search:

1. Use different keywords. Perhaps articles that talk about forest fires in Canada don't use the term "forest fires," but instead use "wildfires." Enter that into your search instead to get different results.
    
2.  Use more keywords. Are the articles too general? Add additional keywords to your search to narrow down your topic. Perhaps you are most interested in how forest fires affect the environment. Add the word environment to your search.
    
3. Use fewer keywords. Are you getting too few results? Try removing one of your keywords. You want to find a balance between finding articles that are related to your topic, but enough that you can find one that works for you.

On the search results page, there are many filters to help refine and improve your search. You can click All filters to see all the available filters, or use the ones that are immediately under your search terms.

Two to get started with are:

1. Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals. This will give you only results that are articles from peer-reviewed journals. All other types of sources (such as books, ebooks, videos, magazine and newspaper articles) will be excluded.

2. Publication Date (default view is All time). If you are required to have articles from the last ten years, or if you are finding that the results you are finding are too old, change your allowed dates here by either typing in the year ranges you want or dragging the blue bars.

On the search results page, you can see the article's title, author, abstract (summary of the article and its research findings), subject headings (special keywords), as well as some other useful information. This information can help you decide if this is the right article for you.

Click on an item title to see additional information about it, and download links.

Underneath the article's title on the item page, you will see links that will lead you to the full text of the article. Look for Access options and/or Download.

Click on whichever one of these links are on your article's item page. It will usually bring you directly to the article's PDF. If it does not, either look on the page it takes you to for the PDF icon, or ask us for help!

At the top of the item page on the right-hand side are several tools. Some of the most useful are:

1. Share. The arrow will give you options to save the item to your Google Drive or OneDrive, email the item to yourself, or create a friendly link to the item page. We recommend using this link instead of the one in the address bar.
   
2. Cite. The quotation marks icon will give you automatically-generated citations in different citation styles (APA, MLA, etc.) for this item. These are a great starting place, but be sure to proofread them using TRU Library's citation style guides! Because they are automatically generated, they often have errors.
   
3. Save and add to folder. These icons will save this item to a folder within the EBSCO platform. These do NOT save to your TRU account--they will only be saved until you close the browser window, or about 20 minutes of the tab being inactive. You can create a MyEBSCO account to save them for future sessions.
   

Boolean Searching

1. Use AND to combine words when you want to find articles that have both words.

Example: tea AND coffee

2. Use OR to combine words when you want to find articles that have either of the words (not necessarily both, but one or the other).

Example: coffee OR cappuccino

• Tip: combine synonyms with OR to broaden your search and make sure that you find enough research!

3. You can combine both AND and OR to create a good advanced search strategy, either by using parentheses or multiple search bars.

Example: tea AND (coffee OR cappuccino)

Phrase Searching

Put quotation marks around phrases in the search bar to ensure that the words are searched as a phrase, not individually.

Example: "social media"

Example: "early childhood education"

Truncation

Put an asterisk ( * ) at the end of words to fill in different word endings.

Example: Canad* will find: Canadian, Canadians, Canada, Canadas

Example: achieve* will find achieves, achieve, achievement, achievements

Caution: you may end up finding words that you didn't want!

Example: Chin* will find China and Chinese, but it will also find chin, chins, and chinstrap (penguins!).