Every month, we get sent a list of the most popular searches on our DISCOVER search engine. It gives us a good idea of assignment 'hot topics' and also informs the way we teach you to use research databases and other library resources.
We've had DISCOVER since about 2012. It's designed for maximum 'resource discovery'. Students told us they wanted something that works like Google, and it does, for the most part. The problem is that the resources that DISCOVER captures are not the same resources as those Google captures. Trying to sift through hundreds of thousands of irrelevant academic journal articles is a waste of your time and will most likely put you off using DISCOVER for ever.
Here's an example. Last month there were 69 searches on DISCOVER for 'journals on teenage pregnancy'. When you type this in, the search engine valiantly goes off and does it's thing, and returns, for your browsing delight, over 88 thousand hits. Yeah, good luck with that. The thing that is interesting to me though is, what were these students actually looking for? Did a lecturer tell students they wanted to see some references from journals? What kind of students were these? Midwifery, social work, child and adolescent studies, education? Did they want something from UK, or overseas, or didn't it matter? Teenage pregnancy is such a huge topic. I wonder if anyone found what they were actually looking for. I hope so.
I've been thinking a lot about the usability of our resources, and how students don't always search in the way that librarians 'expect' them to. A few years ago we carried out a small-scale usability study of DISCOVER and found that students took a very circuitous and time consuming route to get the information they needed. So maybe it isn't that you are searching the 'wrong' way, but that the majority of our resources are designed by librarians who like thesauri and Boolean operators. Until resources and search engines are focused more on the 'user experience' though, your librarian could definitely give you some great tips on how to find some journal articles about teenage pregnancy.
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