Discover@UMSL will time out after about 30 minutes of inactivity, so it’s a good idea to save your searches before stepping away. Even though you log in before searching, you can still lose any work you haven’t actively saved!
By the way, the following procedure was written for Discover@UMSL (which is an EBSCO product), but it should also work with any individual EBSCO database such as Academic Search Complete, ERIC, CINAHL, etc.
1 To save a search:
A Click the Search History link below the search box. This will toggle open an area between the search box and the list of results. NOTE: If this area is empty, click the yellow Search button again to force it to recognize your initial search.
B Decide which search you want to save by looking at:
C When you’ve decided which search to save, select it by clicking the checkbox to the left of the Search ID#, or select all to save all searches from the current session.
D Click the Save Searches / Alerts link.
E Name the search (you can copy and paste the Query from below) and add a description (optional), then click Save.
F Next, you'll be taken to a page that lists all the UMSL databases Discover@UMSL searched. Click Continue to be taken to your account dashboard.
G On your account dashboard, the newly saved search will appear in the Saved Searches section.
H The newest search is at the end of the list. To return to your search results, look for the Back link below your name, near the top left corner of the browser window.
2 You can choose to run very broad searches that encompass only one piece of your topic at a time, and then combine the searches using your Search History:
I In the search box at the top of the page, click the X to clear it. (See the note below L to discover why this is an important step!)
J Click 2 or more checkboxes for the searches you want to combine.
K Combine the searches by clicking either Search with AND or Search with OR. (If the searches are different pieces of your topic, such as social anxiety in one search and teenagers in another, you’ll want to combine them with AND.)
L The combined search will appear as a new search at the top of your history. In the image below, “S1 AND S2” means Search S1 and Search S2 were combined with AND; because we used AND, the number of results is smaller than either of the original searches.
Note: If we had not first cleared the search box of the most recent search (step I above), the new search terms would be (teenagers or adolescents or young adults) AND (S1 AND S2). This usually isn’t an issue when we combine with AND. But if we had combined with OR, the search terms would be (teenagers or adolescents or young adults) AND (S1 OR S2) and we would get the same results as S2 because of the AND operator.
