Library

You can use Library SEARCH to find articles, books and other sources for your assignments and research.

Signing into SEARCH

To get the most out of Library SEARCH, sign in with your UOW login before you start searching. ‘Sign in for complete results’ is selected from the home page.

This will allow you to place holds, save items to a list, keep a record of your search strategies, and access results only available to UOW students and staff.

Simple search

Let’s start with a simple search.

Enter ‘Frogs’.

Select ‘Search’.

‘Frogs’ is entered into the search bar on the Library home page. Search is selected and the results list appears.

My results list includes books, ebooks, journal articles, and book chapters.

Use the ‘Refine Search Results’ section to focus your results. Let’s look at finding ebooks.

Under ‘Source Types’, select ‘Books/ebooks.’

Under ‘Availability’, select ‘Available online.’

And apply the filters.

Now all the results in your list are ebooks.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

To limit to peer-reviewed journal articles, reset your filters to get the full results list.

Under Availability, limit to Peer reviewed journals.

You can also limit by Publication Date.

Let’s limit to articles published between 2010 and 2020 and select ‘Refine.’

To go straight to the full text of an article, select ‘Available Online.’

Sign in using your UOW username and password to be taken to the resource.

For more information about a text, select the title from your results list.

You will then see more detail. For example, an abstract and your options for accessing the resource.

Advanced search

An advanced search lets you build a more specific search. ‘Advanced SEARCH’ is selected from the UOW Library homepage.

For example, you can search for an exact title, an author and include an exact phrase.

Using keywords, we’re going to search for a more specific topic.

“bell frogs” is entered into the first search bar. AND is selected before the second search bar. (Tasmania OR Victoria) is entered into the second search bar.

It’s helpful to enter a specific phrase in quotation marks.

To focus your topic further, use the ‘AND’ function to join your related concepts.

In this example, I am searching for information on bell frogs in Tasmania or Victoria, so we are going to use ‘OR’ to search for either state.

‘Search’ is selected. A results list of 153 results appears. This has produced a more targeted results set for this topic.

Search fields are refreshed.

Finding items from a citation

When you already know what book you’re looking for, enter the title and change the search filter to ‘Title.’ Title is selected and “waking the frog” is entered.

You can also enter the author name and change the search filter to ‘Author/Creator’ to help you find the book straight away. Author/Creator is selected and “rand” is entered.

Waking the Frog by Tom Rand appears instantly in the search results list.

The availability section will let you know how to access the book and you can select this for more information.

If you need any further help, please contact us at the Library.