DISCOVER tip: what does it search?

When you search DISCOVER your main results can include hits from 41 different databases, plus 'more results' from another 17 external databases (in the column on the right). In time, those 17 additional databases will expand to 40 databases (see below).

The main search includes 4 multidisciplinary databases:

University of Liverpool Catalogue
TOC Plus (a huge 'base index' of data supplied directly by publishers)
Academic Search Complete (EBSCO's largest multidisciplinary full-text database)
British Library Document Supply Centre Inside Serials & Conference Proceedings (i.e. Zetoc)

and 37 databases with some element of subject specialisation:

Agricola
Alexander Street Press
America: History & Life
Art & Architecture Complete
Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals
British Nursing Index
Business Source Premier
CINAHL
Communication & Mass Media Complete
Computers & Applied Sciences Complete
EconLit
Environment Complete
ERIC
GeoRef
GeoRef In Process
Global Health
Global Health Archive
GreenFILE
Historical Abstracts
Humanities International Complete
Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts
MEDLINE
MEDLINE with Full Text
MLA Directory of Periodicals
MLA International Bibliography
Music Index
Philosopher's Index
PsycARTICLES
PsycINFO
Race Relations Abstracts
Regional Business News
RILM Abstracts of Music Literature
RISM Series A/II: Music Manuscripts after 1600
Shock & Vibration Digest
SPORTDiscus with Full Text
Teacher Reference Center
Urban Studies Abstracts

Our DISCOVER 'subject profiles' (Health & Life Science, Humanities, Science & Engineering, and Social Sciences) search the 4 multidisciplinary databases, plus a subset of the 37 subject specialist databases. Searching one of our 'subject profiles' won't find you anything that you won't find in our main DISCOVER search, but it can help to reduce 'noise' from irrelevant hits and make useful hits more prominent.

Similarly our main search's 'more results' area uses 3 multidisciplinary databases:

Scopus
ISI Web of Knowledge
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

and 14 subject specialist databases:

ASSIA: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts
BHI: British Humanities Index
Biological Sciences
BIOSIS Previews
CSA High Technology Research Database with Aerospace
DAAI: Design and Applied Arts Index
Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts
Oceanic Abstracts
ProQuest: Historical Newspapers, The New York Times
Social Services Abstracts
Sociological Abstracts
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Again, our DISCOVER 'subject profiles' search the 3 multidisciplinary databases, plus a subset of the 14 subject specialist databases.

Over time we intend adding the following databases to our 'more results' databases:

ACM Digital Library
Aqualine
ARTbibliographies Modern
ASFA Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts
Biotechnology & Bioengineering Abstracts
British Standards Online
Cochrane Library
Compendex
Conference Papers Index
Credo Reference
Early English Books Online - EEBO
ECCO - Eighteenth Century Online
Economist Historical Archive 1843-2006
IEEE Xplore
JSTOR
Literature Online Criticism - LION
Literature Online Fulltext - LION
MathSciNet
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Union Catalog
Oxford Reference Online Core Collection
SPIE Digital Library
Technology Research Database
Times Digital Archive, 1785-1985
TLS Historical Archive 1902-2005

We'll keep you added as new sources are added to our main databases and our external databases. Look out for Web of Knowledge and NBER Working Papers in our main search soon.

Our LibGuides list the full range of databases that we have for each subject, regardless of whether or not they are included in DISCOVER searches.

Impact Factors via SFX

We now offer a new way to find out the impact factor for a journal.

If it is a journal for which we have online access, locate it using the 'Searchable list of e-Journals' on our e-journals page (i.e. not by using Search the Library Catalogue for e-Journals):

Click on the journal title in the list (not on any of the full-text sources listed below it) and you will see an SFX screen that offers a link to the Impact Factor:


This takes you to the full Impact Factor report for the journal on Journal Citation Reports (ISI Web of Knowledge).

You will see an Impact Factor link offered on every SFX screen for any journal that has an impact factor. So if you want the Impact Factor for a journal that we can't access online, just find an article in it in a database that offers find it @ liverpool links (most do!) and follow that link.

Where a journal appears in both the Science and Social Science editions of JCR we just offer a link to the Science Edition to avoid offering two links to the same information. The actual Impact Factor is the same in both editions!

SFX now offers links to SUNCAT

If you follow one of our find it @ liverpool / SFX links for an article that we cannot access online (or indeed if you use our 'Go straight to an Article' form on our e-journals page) you will now be offered a link to see if the journal is listed in SUNCAT, the UK Serials Union Catalog (a catalogue that combines the journals catalogues of over 75 UK libraries, including the British Library).

This can be useful to help you:

- to decide whether an Inter-Library Loan is likely to be successful (quickly)

- to decide which other libraries you could visit to get hold of the journals you

- need to make a case for us to start subscribing to the journal ("look, all these places have it!")

For example, the absence of a Full Text icon for this article in Scopus suggests we don't have full-text access online:

Sure enough, the SFX screen does not offer a full-text link, but as well as offering a link to search our own catalogue it also offers a link to search SUNCAT for the journal:

We don't have this journal in our own catalogue:

But SUNCAT tells us that plenty of other libraries do stock it, and it tells us the coverage at each location:


So you could conclude that you'll probably be able to get hold of this easily through one of our document delivery services.

Faculty of 1000 Biology and Medicine merge

Faculty of 1000 Biology and Faculty of 1000 Medicine have merged to become... Faculty of 1000. Our subscription now also includes The Scientist: Magazine of the Life Sciences.

Never heard of Faculty of 1000? Think of it as a panel of experts who manage your information overload by highlighting and reviewing the articles that you really should read. Or the long version of that...

The core service of Faculty of 1000 (F1000) identifies and evaluates the most important articles in biology and medical research publications. The selection process comprises a peer-nominated global 'Faculty' of the world's leading scientists and clinicians who rate the best of the articles they read and explain their importance. Launched in 2002, F1000 was conceived as a collaboration of 1000 international Faculty Members. The remit of our service continues to grow and the Faculty now numbers more than 10,000 experts whose evaluations form a fully searchable resource identifying the best research available. Faculty Members and their evaluations are organized into over 40 Faculties (subjects), which are further subdivided into over 300 Sections. On average, 1,500 new evaluations are published each month; this corresponds to approximately the top 2% of all published articles in the biological and medical sciences.

Who's Who / Who Was Who now available

We are delighted to announce that we now have a subscription to Who's Who and Who Was Who online. Access is available now at http://www.ukwhoswho.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/.

To help fund this we have cancelled our subscription to International Who's Who (known online for some reason as World Who's Who). The evidence from usage was overwhelming. In our two-month trial of Who's Who / Who Was Who we accessed 3,751 entries. That's more than double the number of entires read in World Who's Who in the last 6 years!

BioOne - more titles

Our subscription to BioOne, the collection of biology e-journals from a large number of mainly small learned societies now includes both their Collection 1 and Collection 2.

What is more, it is costing us less to take both collections, than to take just Collection 1, courtesy of the joint UK-German-Danish-Dutch Knowledge Exchange consortium.

There are 61 additional titles available.

DISCOVER and LibGuides replace Metalib

Today we launched two new services that replace Metalib for searching multiple resources and for finding which resources are available in your subject area: DISCOVER and LibGuides.

DISCOVER, powered by EBSCO Discovery Service, provides a simple, yet quick and powerful, way to search a huge number of resources at the same time. When you search DISCOVER it searches:

1. multiple subject-specific indexes, like Medline, GeoRef, PsycINFO, MLA and Historical Abstracts
2. multiple full-text databases like Business Source Premier and Academic Search Complete
3. multidisplinary databases like 'TOC Plus' and the British Library's tables of contents database which powers Zetoc
4. our own library catalogue.

As well as providing you with a single set of results from all those resources it also runs separate searches of datbases that can't (yet) be included within DISCOVER itself, like Web of Knowledge and Scopus and you can look at those results separately. Over the next couple of weeks we'll refine exactly which external resources are covered by DISCOVER, and this will change as more resources are built into the main DISCOVER search.

A DISCOVER search involves 4 simple steps:

1. Enter your search
2. Refine your results using the facets on the left
3. Explore your results and view full records and full text
4. Explore more results from additional sources.

As well as our all-encompassing DISCOVER search we're offering 4 subject-focussed searches that should still find almost everything that's relevant, but with reduced 'noise' from irrelvant hits.

LibGuides are our new way of guiding you towards the resources that we provide in your subject area. Library resources change a lot, so even if you think you know it all, check the LibGuides pages for your subject area and see what you're missing. Over time we'll enhance our LibGuides pages with more tutorials and guidance.

If you have any questions or comments about DISCOVER or LibGuides, please contact your liaison librarian.

TRIAL: Archives of Revista de Libros

We have a free trial of Revista de Libros until the end of October.

To access this trial go to: http://www.revistadelibros.com/. For off-campus access, login to Apps Anywhere and launch Internet Explorer from its Web or Office folder, and then access the trial using that instance of Internet Explorer. If we subscribe we’ll setup off-campus access through EZproxy of course.

Revista de Libros covers the latest intellectual trends in literature, science, philosophy, economics or history, among other fields. Triggered by the publication of one or several books -or just by the importance of a particular topic- distinguished experts and scholars monthly contribute with in-depth articles and essays.

Revista de Libros' first print issue appeared in 1996 and, after more than a decade, it has achieved a place of reference among cultural magazines in Spanish - as has TLS in the United Kingdom or The New York Review of Books in USA. The full archive contains more than 4,500 full-length articles and summaries about more than 15,000 books.

Please leave any feedback you have on this resource through the comments section 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.