A-Z Databases: One Search: One Search for Research

One Search will be really useful for easily accessing books and journal articles - for a lot of academic research, these will be important components. To search for these effectively you have to use different searches to locate these resources.

Books: when you're looking for a book, whether print or electronic, use the Local Search function.

Journal articles: if you're looking for a journal article, use the Articles search.

Basic or Advanced Search?

Basic Search in OneSearch is useful for doing simple searches. Advanced Search allows a great deal more flexibility and precision so you may wish to use this as your research progresses.

Search Techniques

The default search is Any Field - all Basic Searches use this. This means it searches for the term across the item record - in the title, the authors' names, subject headings. In Advanced Search you can specify the search field you wish to use.

You can enhance your search by using some of these techniques:

• Phrase search - including the terms in double quotation marks "" to ensure they appear together (e.g. "logistics innovation").

• Boolean search:

  • AND (+) - narrows down the results. All connected terms must be included in the results (e.g. logistics AND supply chain).

  • OR (|) - broadens out the results. Either connected term can be included in the results (e.g. logistics OR supply chain).

  • NOT (-) narrows down the results. The second term must be excluded from the results (e.g. "logistics innovation" NOT patenting).

• Truncation symbol * to find variations of word endings (e.g. leaders* will find leaders and leadership).

Researchers don't necessarily use standard terminology and they may write about the same topic in different ways. For this reason, it's a good idea before you start your literature search to think about what keywords you need to search with so that you find the a broad set of relevant results:

• Try brainstorming all the different search terms you might want to search, as well as sub-topics and specific aspects you wish to focus on.
• Think of different ways of expressing the same topic.
• Remember variant spellings and different terminology used in different countries.

When you start reading around your subject you may learn new terms - if you do, it can be a good idea to re-run your literature search with these terms.

Journal Articles

When searching for journal articles use the Articles search. You may find it easier to use Advanced Search option, as this will allow you greater flexibility.

• Articles are often on very specific topics so try to have a clear idea what your looking for. For instance, a search on a general topic like head trauma will bring up a huge amount of results - add more search terms to narrow your search: 
  
  head trauma
  AND rugby
   
• If you're getting too many results, in advanced search change the search field from a keyword to a title search. This will reduce the number of results while increasing the relevance.
   
• If you're getting too few results: 
  • try reducing the number of search terms you are using.
  • check you are using AND and OR in an appropriate way.
  • remove quotation marks from search terms
     
• Creating an effective literature search can be difficult in some circumstances - if you need help at any point, please contact library@uws.ac.uk to arrange an appointment with a librarian.

​​​​​​​Books​​​​​​​

When searching for books use Local Search. You may find it easier to use Advanced Search option, as this will allow you greater flexibility.

You can use the same techniques to find books as well as journal articles. However, compared to journal articles which can be very specific, books will often be more general in scope - so if you don't find many results on your specific topic try and think more generally to identify relevant items.

Once you've performed a search, it's possible to filter the results to suit your needs. This filter bar will appear on the right-hand side of the screen if you are using a computer; you can find it by clicking the filter symbol if you're using a smart phone.

Here are some of the most useful filter options:

Availability: either In the Library or Full Text Online.

Library: this allows you to limit results to specific UWS Library sites.

Type of Item: you can limit your results to Books, Journals, Theses, Dissertations etc.

Creation Date: use this to limit the results by publication date (e.g. only books published between 2015 - 2020).

Here's how you can get hold of the full text, once you've found what you're looking for. These work better if you're logged in so make sure you've done this before trying to access the full text.

To access any sort of item, first click on the title to get through to the full record.

Print Book
If it's a print book it will either say it's available or not. It will also tell you where you can find it. Here's an example of what this would look like: 

Paisley > Level 3 > 823.912 ORW

This means that it's available in the Paisley campus library and that it's on Level 3 of that library. 823.912 ORW indicates where it is held on the shelf - signage in the library will help you to locate this, but please ask for help if you can't find it.

If the book is not available, you will see an option to Reserve - this means that you'll join a queue to borrow the book once it's returned. Please note: the option to reserve will only show up once you're signed in.

Electronic Books and Journal Articles

Electronic books will say Online Access - clicking on this will take you to the full-text of the ebook.

Electronic journal articles will say Full-text Available - clicking on this will take you to the article home page.