Use Discovery as a starting point for your research to get an overview of the key concepts, themes, and authors of your topic.
Discovery will find:
Scholarly resources including journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers;
Grey literature resources including news articles, theses, media;
Research Starters: summaries of topics created using high quality resources.
While Discovery will help you find a broad range of resource types, it's not an appropriate place for conducting a systematic or rigorous search. Discovery search results do not include everything that the library provides access to. We recommend you always search for resources in more than one place, including some library databases in your subject area.
When searching with Discovery, keep in mind that:
You might be missing out on content
Discovery does not include every resource the library has access to. Some scholarly resources are only discoverable in library catalogues, specialised collections and subject-specific databases. Find the best library databases for your subject area listed in our Library Guides.
Not designed for rigorous searches
Discovery is not an appropriate place for conducting in-depth research, literature reviews or any type of searching that requires systematic or rigorous searching. It does not allow for precise searching using subject headings (e.g. MeSH) and does not have subject specific ways to filter results (e.g. by population, by research methodology). Library databases are the best place to conduct rigorous searching.
You need to evaluate what you find
Discovery includes resources from many subject areas, and not everything will be relevant to your research. If you’re not sure what is and isn’t relevant for your work, analysing your assessment task and using a writing process can help you stay on track. Try using subject search filters to refine your results.