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Nutrition: Effective Library Research: 4. Library Search

Online tutorial introducing you to the skills and techniques needed for effective library research.

Finding Resources Using Library Search

Library Search

Search across the print and online collections for books, chapters, articles, journals and lots more. 


Library Search will help you discover books, journals, articles, audio visual material and more on your chosen topic. This is a good place to start when you are beginning to research a topic as you can draw on content from a variety of different sources.

For more in depth research in databases and archives, use the A-Z Databases List.

Watch the videos below on using Library Search, take a look at the search examples and complete the Library Search tutorial to check your learning. 

A search for 'nutrition AND exercise' in Library Search returns the following catalogue results. Note the type of content. There is a mixture of print and electronic texts.

This search finds matches in book and journal titles.  For more granular searching within the content of books and journals you should use the Articles + more feature of Library Search and the research databases.

To check our access to a specific journal search the catalogue using the title information. This will allow you to see if we have access to the journal and the years / volumes available.

Here is an example of a search for the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics.

A search for 'health promotion AND nutrition' in Library Search Articles + more returns the following results. 

In addition to all the content in the Catalogue tab, there is also a wide range of content from various full text resources, with journal articles that match your search terms.

Articles + more search is often a good starting point for introductory material, but if you want to research the global literature on a topic, and go beyond quick full text results, then you should follow up with a database search. You can tailor your search more precisely using all the sophisticated functionality available on the research databases.  

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