Have you been looking for ways to improve your usearch results?  The number one tip – sign in to your account!  Unless you are on a networked computer on campus, in order to see all of the available results you need to sign in.  This is because some of the databases and journals we subscribe to require us to prove that we have a subscription before the results can be included for your search – so sign in and reap the benefits of our large, varied collection!

If I find an article from a specific database in usearch, does that mean the whole database is searchable there?

Not necessarily – because of the way content is provided to Ex Libris, the software vendor, we don’t know exactly what the overlap is between Primo Central (the index that usearch searches) and our research databases.  It could be 100% in some cases, but in others, as low as 0%.

 So how do I know what usearch searches?

When we figure it out, we’ll let you know!  Kidding.  We know some of the resources that are included in usearch, and some that aren’t.  For example, most EBSCO databases are not searchable through usearch, because EBSCO hasn’t provided information about their content to Ex Libris.

Here are some of the resources we know are included:

• JSTOR
• PsycARTICLES
• Oxford Journals
• Web of Science – Arts & Humanities, Science, and Social Science Citation Indexes
• Medline Journals
• ERIC
• Emerald eJournals

Even though Academic Search Complete isn’t searchable in usearch because it is an EBSCO product, 87% of the content is searchable because it’s covered by other databases that ARE included.  And don’t despair if your favourite database isn’t on this list – this is just a fraction of the over 400 million items that are indexed, and more are being added all the time.

Also, did you know:

You can use wildcards to help refine or expand your search results.  Some examples of wildcards you can use in usearch are:

• Single character wildcard – use a question mark “?” e.g., wom?n will bring back results that include woman, women, etc.
• Multiple character wildcard – use an asterisk “*” e.g., cultur* will bring back culture, cultures, cultural, etc.

A note:  you can’t use wildcard place holders at the beginning of the search term – a search for ?ack or *ack will be as if you just searched ack.