EBSCO Discovery Service

Ebsco is a database with access to thousands of resources. Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS) integrates the majority of our databases and resources into one, providing the ability to search through all of our resources at once, including JSTOR, our own catalog, and Bloomsbury, among several others. This makes the search and discovery process of research much more streamlined, and for this reason, is our recommended catalog, unless you are trying to request a book through Mobius, in which case you would use Locate. 

Use this link to login. 

Complete the login through Open Athens using your student, patron or faculty/staff account. Make sure you use your Ozark Christian College email address, and if you are logged into a browser, it needs to be through this address as well. 

Once you login through Open Athens, you should have access to Ebsco. If you encounter any issues logging in, send our Technical Services Librarian an email. 
 

Natural Language Search

Natural Language Search is automatically enabled and utilizes AI to perform a Boolean search as needed and alleviates the need to use proper search terms or subject headings to get accurate results. It makes searching easier and more accurate while naturally performing what had taken an advanced search to do. Natural Language Search is a toggle switch located right under the search bar should you want to turn it off or back on. 

AI Insights

AI Insights performs AI generated summaries to help you assess how relevant a source may be to your search. It will appear labeled under a source listing.

People Pages

People Pages are profiles on authors or contributors that you can access by clicking on the name of the author. When the author has a profile you can access the will be a green leaf next to their name as pictured below.

Citation Discovery and References 

Citation Discovery helps you to see other works that have cited this source, performing passive source mining and creating a trail for your research. The citation box appears below a search result as pictured above, or once you have opened a result, it will be listed next to References, which cites all referenced works from the source. 
 

As the EDS is a large database, with thousands of integrated resources, learning how to effectively search and utilize features is important.

The sidebar on the left of the home page has several easy to access features such as searching by scripture, logging in to your account, or going directly to the library website.

From the home page, you have two options for searching. Basic search has several of the most relevant features already checked but there are a few filters to note. If you would only like to search within the Seth Wilson Library collection, you can check “Catalog Only” and if you do not require full text results you may uncheck this option to browse abstracts or summaries. 
 

Also from the home page, you can select “Advanced Search”. This may be helpful if you are receiving either too wide or narrow of a pool of results, or if you have a particular topic you are researching. 
 

The main feature of “Advanced Search” is the ability to refine your search by Boolean Operators. Boolean Operators are “And, Or, Not” and can have a large impact on your search results. Searching two terms with the Boolean Operator “And” will provide all of the results for both terms. “Or” will provide for either term. “Not” will help distinguish terms and will not include the selected term in results. This is a simple but effective strategy for refining your search to meet your needs. 
 

Remember to use your filters! To the left of the page is a list of liters to apply when searching where you can limit by media type, location, date, and several others. Due to the amount of resources in the EDS, filtering out results you know are not relevant to you will improve your research experience and provide more targeted results in less time.  
 

When you have selected a resource you would like to use, you are able to cite directly from Ebsco, with a few caveats. You are must check the citation for accuracy, and there are only a few citation styles available. Turabian is not available at the moment, but APA or MLA may be useful to you depending on your course requirements. 
 

From the small sidebar to the right of your resource you can choose “Cite” your source and then select the citation style. 
 

If you have additional questions, Ebsco has an additional tutorial, as well as support options here. 
 

You can also send our Technical Services Librarian an email through the widget on the bottom right corner of the page.