"Discover" - A New Service from the University of Illinois Library

Starting this week, you will begin to see this new button in many of our online resources, includes journal indexes, RefWorks, and even Google Scholar. Click on it and see what happens!

What is the primary function of the Discover button?

Where can I find the Discover button?

We're starting by putting the button in all the citations in the Engineering Village databases (Compendex and Inspec), the abstract databases such as Medline when searched via the ScienceDirect interface, the ScienceDirect (Elsevier) journals, and several other non-science resources. New Flash! Discover links are now in Web of Science, too!

You will also find a text link to University of Illinois' Discover service when you search Google Scholar from on campus. However, instead of the Discover button, you will see these text links: "Discover UIUC Full Text" or "Discover UIUC other svcs". If you use Google Scholar from off-campus, you will need to set up your Google Scholar preferences to show University of Illinois's links (just search for Illinois in the Library Links box on Google Scholar's Preferences page).

The Discover button will appear in most other indexes and abstracts, such as Web of Science and PubMed, before the start of the Spring term, 2006. New Flash: 12/9/05: Discover links are now in Web of Science, too!

What does the Discover button do?

• Links to the full text of the article. Often these will go directly to the article of interest. Occasionally they will take you to the issue or journal home page, and you'll need to work your way to the individual full text article. There may be more than one link to full text, if the article is available from multiple providers.
  
  Although many of the indexes already have links to the full text for some articles, you'll see the Discover button on every citation in an index. If the stand-alone "full text" link is present, try it first. But if it's not present, click on the Discover link... you'll often find that this new system is able to Discover the location of full text!
  
  
• A link to the University of Illinois Online Catalog record for the journal. This will allow you to determine if we have a subscription to the journal and whether the the issue you need is available on campus. This is particularly useful if we do not yet have e-access for the journal.
  
  
• A link to Interlibrary Loan. In those situations where University of Illinois does not have a subscription to the journal containing the article you need, you may click on this link. This link will only appear when Discover was not able to provide a link to the full text of the article. After logging into the Campus secure system with your NetId and password, you will find yourself at a screen where the bibliographic information for the article has already been filled in for you. All you need to do to request the article is hit the submit button! Within a week or so, the article will be delivered to you, often electronically.
  
  
• A link to RefWorks. This will fill in the citation and abstract information for the article in your RefWorks account. RefWorks is a bibliographic management tool that allows you to create bibliographies, and to import them into Word documents as you write. RefWorks is similar to EndNote, except that it is web-based, so you can access it from anywhere. (We expect to have a Discover link for exporting the citation to EndNote, soon.) Read more about RefWorks.
  
  
• A link to Google Scholar. You may search for other articles by this author, or other articles on the topic in the Google Scholar database. Google Scholar is a freely available database of scholarly citations from thousands of publishers. We will soon be providing University of Illinois Discover links in Google Scholar, too, so you can go directly to the full text of resources for which we hold e-subscriptions. Read more about Google Scholar.

Learn more about University of Illinois's Discover Service.

Sample screens:

Web of Science - Search results screen:

Discover PopUp window that appears when the Discover button for item 3, above, is clicked: