This video has no voiceover but it does have a music track, so don't forget to mute the audio if you find it distracting.
There are a range of free add-ons that you can attach to your browser to make the search process, and finding full text results, a little easier. More items may be added as they become available and we've had a chance to assess their usefulness.
Click here to see the recommended add-ons
There is also a plug-in available to use alongside BrowZine that automatically provide links to full-text content of journal articles where the Library has a subscription to the particular journal. This can be used anywhere on the internet.
It's called LibKey Nomad, and...(Click here for more)
...you can install it for a variety of browsers here - You just need to install the plug-in and then select 'University of Derby'
Once this is done, whenever you come across a journal article when browsing the internet or searching Google, LibKey Nomad will inform you if the article is available through our library's subscriptions, or if there is an open access copy available. You will see a 'Download PDF' alert at the bottom of the page, as seen in the image below.
You can then click on the banner and it will take you to the full text of the article (if you're not logged in to the University's systems, it will ask you to do that first before re-directing you to the full text).
Obviously to get full access, it is always best to go via our resources, but this does mean you can still access those resources we pay for from whenever you are on the internet.
It is a browser extension that automatically detects when you are on a site that the Library can give you access to. If you visit a site which the Library doesn’t provide access to, the extension will try and suggest an alternative route, including Open Access content. Get more information, and the link to download the Lean Library add on, via our Lean Library information page.
BrowZine is a tool which allow you to browse across a range of subjects to discover ejournals which you may not be familiar with.
You can use it to:
You can access BrowZine and watch a help video from the links below. The link will take you to a selection for Arts and Humanities but you can browse any subject area you choose by selecting the option to change subject.
One of the key tools that you will find most useful across all databases and also search engines like Google or Bing is the phrase search.
The benefit of this type of search is that you can use it to get around the database's standard search approach of looking for all of your words singly and giving you results for each one, and you can force it instead to search for the phrase - i.e. show you results where all words in a phrase appear exactly as you've typed them in.
The symbol for a phrase search is the double quotes key "like this" which is SHIFT+2 on a Windows keyboard and the double quotes symbol on the quote key for a Mac or Bluetooth keyboard.
So if we search for health promotion - the database will look for health anywhere, promotion anywhere, and health promotion together so you'll get a lot of irrelevant results, especially if you're using a supermassive resource like Library Plus.
But if we search for "health promotion" we'll get fewer results and they will be more relevant because we've told the database to show us articles or books where health is immediately followed by the word promotion with no other words or punctuation separating them.
If you only ever use one search tool then the phrase search is the most key that I would recommend.
Have a look at the example searches with results below:
Health promotion (without speech marks - via Library Search)
"Health promotion" (with speech marks - via Library Search)
And then, if you add in an extra word or two, or a phrase to make your search a little more specific, you can narrow your results further without losing relevancy.
Click here to see an image of a slightly more detailed search
Truncation is another tool that can be useful even in a basic search. Truncate means 'to cut off' and in terms of searching it means we remove the end of a particular word, leaving behind the stem which is shared by multiple terms so that we can look for them all without having to type every word in.
So you could use it to look for words that have a singular ending of 'y' and a plural ending of 'ies' e.g. therapy / therapies or you could look for words that start with the same set of letters no matter the range of endings e.g. ocean / oceans / oceanography / oceanography / oceanographer
The symbol for truncation is an asterisk (SHIFT+8 on your keyboard) and generally goes at the end of a sequence of letters.
So for the therapy example, you would type into the database or search engine search box: therap*
For the oceanography example it would be ocean*
You can also use the truncation symbol at the same time as using phrase searching, so you could have "occupational therap*" which would find 'occupational therapy' / 'occupational therapies' / 'occupational therapist' / 'occupational therapists'
ALSO: Have a look at the Intermediate box for the Web of Science as this gives slightly different use of the * for that database
