RESOLVED - Discover and EBSCO Databases Intermittent Technical Difficulties 20/07/16

EBSCO are experiencing intermittent technical difficulties and this might affect your use of Discover and/or EBSCO databases. Their engineers are working to restore stability as priority and hope to rectify the situation soon.

UPDATE
EBSCO have reported that these technical issues have now been resolved.

Resource of the Week - DISCOVER

Need to research a topic for your assignment? Want to read beyond the textbooks and find articles from quality journals? Try DISCOVER  

What is it?
DISCOVER is a “Unified Resource Discovery” tool, unified because entering your search terms once in a simple Google type box allows you to search across many thousands of journals and our key academic databases. (For more detail on exactly what DISCOVER searches see here) You can search DISCOVER directly from the Library Home page, or search a subject specific group of databases via our LibGuides pages  

Why use it?
DISCOVER will help you to find quality sources for your assignments quickly and easily. Many of your results will appear with a PDF icon so you can open up the article straight away, but you can also use the  "is is @ Liverpool" tool to access the full text of the article.

Problem with EBSCO via EZproxy - resolved

This problem of article-level and journal-level links to EBSCO leading to the EBSCOhost advanced search instead has been resolved.

If you are still experiencing problems please contact us.

Index to Legal Periodicals and Books now on EBSCO

Following the acquisition of the HW Wilson Company by (or is that the merger with?) EBSCO, we now have access to Index to Legal Periodicals and Books on the EBSCOhost platform, and it is included in DISCOVER searches (main profile and the Social Sciences profile).

We've updated the links in our catalogue and LibGuides. You'll find it at http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/login.aspx?authtype=ip&profile=EHOST&defaultdb=ilh.

DISCOVER tip: not enough results?

If a DISCOVER search produces few (or no) results, click on the Refine Search option under the search box:

and select the option to also search within the full-text of articles and search again.

You should now find far more hits, but some of them will probably not be that relevant.

We turn off 'also search within the full-text of articles' in the default settings because we found that it often leads to too many irrelevant hits, but it is a useful trick to use when necessary. Note also that full-text searching is only available for a proportion of the records in DISCOVER, so choosing this option will tend to promote those records over ones for which full-text is not available (which is another reason why we leave it turned off by default).

If you find you usually get better results with this option turned on then you can Sign In to DISCOVER to register for a personal EBSCO account that will allow you set this option as one of your preferences.

Philosopher's Index - which platform?

The outcome of the consultation below was that we decided to renew Philosopher's Index on the Ovid platform. But at least we asked!

Our subscription to Philosopher's Index on the Ovid platform is coming up for renewal and we would like to give users the opportunity to decide whether to continue on this platform or to switch to CSA Illumina or EBSCOhost. Please try the three platforms directly:

CSA Illumina
EBSCOhost
Ovid

and through Metalib (click on the magnifying glass icons). Metalib is only suitable for quite crude searches but you might find that some versions work better than others in the Metalib environment.

Once you have tried all 3 versions please leave your comments below. You can choose the anonymous option to comment without needing to have a Blogger account, but it helps if you include your name in your feedback so that we can follow up on comments.