The Discovery Search is the main search in the blue box on the Library's homepage. It searches all of our collections and databases. It works best for finding:
If you're looking for scholarly articles for a specific academic field, we recommend you use one of our dedicated databases. See the Research Tools Tutorial or go to the A-Z Databases page, click the All Subject drop-down box, and select your research area.
Library databases search differently than Google. Google can interpret your search, while library databases search literally by matching the terms you searched with the articles in the database. To be most effective in library databases, you need to shift your searching from the day-to-day Google searching we normally do, to the strategically searching of a librarian. The above tutorial walks you through keyword searching and using Boolean operators to best search in library databases.
You can find an interactive version of this tutorial here: Keyword Searching Tutorial.