On the library home page you'll find Discovery, a meta-search engine which searches all resources -- print and online -- which KSL makes available to you. These include all catalog records in our online catalog and the OhioLINK catalog, the full text of all our online journals, all the indexing and abstracting in our research databases, and all our full-text databases.
Below is an example search strategy for finding online journal articles.
Go to library.case.edu and find the Search Discovery box:
Your best strategy will be filtering results you find in Discovery using the steps below:
Step 1: Think about keywords which reflect your topic on a broad level. The best searches are small strings of nouns. You can connect terms by logical operators (AND, OR, NOT), but avoid using terms such as "effect" or "impact" which relate search terms to each other. Use a single asterisk to stand in for multiple characters: wom*n = woman or women, music* = music or musician or musical. Use quotation marks around phrases: “united states”. Note: EBSCO offers a detailed 'help' section, found in the top right within your search results.
Step 2: Apply limits from the left sidebar to narrow your results. For online journal articles, select full-text under Limit To, and check the box next to Academic Journals under Source Type.
Step 3: Under Limit by Subject, click Show More … and choose one (or two) which seem relevant to your topic. These are terms which show up in the indexing for an article or the full text of an article.
Step 4: close the Subject Terms box. Browse the results to find relevant articles. There are a number of ways to browse quickly and effectively:
a. Note the article title.
b. Note the name of the journal. This may help you understand the author’s perspective on a subject.
c. Note the Subjects underneath each title. These are also clues to content.
e. Access the full text and download to your computer. Use the Find command to see if certain terms related to your topic are present and where they appear in the article.
Step 5: If an article look promising, click on the small folder icon to the right of the article’s title. This will place the article in a folder, but make sure to sign in before closing Discovery in order to save them to your account.
Step 6: The key to this search strategy is step 7, which is a reiteration of steps 3-6: Once you have browsed articles under one subject heading, go back, unclick your choice under Subject and choose another to work with. Repeat the process of browsing and saving. Do this as long as you like, choosing different subject terms, or even modifying your original search. Browse and save from these sets of articles.
Step 7: When you feel you have enough articles, click on your saved articles folder in the upper right-hand corner. Note that you can reformat the list in various citation formats such as MLA or Chicago/Turabian. Be sure to email the list (in its original or Discovery format) to yourself.
Using EBSCO databases for Interdisciplinary Research:
Many library databases are provided by EBSCO, which offers a common interface that can search multiple disciplines at once, such as theater and literature, or the performing arts and psychology. Below is a method you can try:
Go to library.case.edu and click on Databases.
From the A-Z list, select the database International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance.
Once inside the database:
Step 1. Click on "Choose Databases" which is immediately above the search box.
Step 2. From the popup list check "PsycINFO" which indexes the literature of psychology.
Step 3. Click OK and you will be returned to the search boxes.
Step 4. Your searching will now look in both databases. Once you get a results list, the bottom of the left-hand sidebar will list the number of results from each of the databases.
Academic Search Complete is another good option to include for broad searches within EBSCO databases.
