Getting the most out of Discover: using advanced search to find journal articles

As well as using the basic search box to search for journal articles in Discover, you can also use the advanced search option to enable you to build more specific searches which will help to make your results more relevant.

Advanced search enables you to build your search by using connecting words AND, OR and NOT to combine or exclude different or alternative concepts to narrow or broaden your search. You can also search for a phrase by using quotation marks around your search terms.

In advanced searching you can also select different fields to search, for example you can search the whole text of an article or limit your search to the title field only.

If your search isn’t bringing back many results try using truncation and wildcards to expand your search. Truncating a root word or part of a word with the * (asterisk) symbol will find all words containing letters after the symbol. For example: comput* will find the words computer, compute and computing.

You can find more tips on using advanced search by clicking on the blue question mark help icons on the advanced search page in Discover.