When you're working on an assignment or exploring a new topic, knowing where to find reliable information is essential. The Library provides access to a wide range of high-quality academic resources to support your learning.
In this section, we'll guide you through the key tools for finding books, journal articles, and other materials.
Library Search is the Library's online discovery tool, and a good place to start with any search. It searches and provides access to eBooks, journal articles, dissertations, newspaper articles, and other similar content.
We recommend using Library Search for your research because:
You can access all the content it searches for free through the university’s subscriptions.
It covers a broad range of resources across all subject areas, selected by librarians and academic staff to support teaching, reading lists, and research. This makes your results more relevant to your studies.
The sources it searches are ideal for academic study and have been peer-reviewed, ensuring they are accurate and of a high quality.
(The peer-review process involves experts evaluating a researcher's work to ensure its accuracy, quality, and originality before publication.)
Your subject guide lists key databases and other useful resources tailored to your discipline. You can find these in the left-hand menu of each guide.
Accessing databases via your subject guide ensures you will have the full access of a Sussex University student.
The Online Resources A–Z lets you search for a database by keyword, type, or availability using the search bar at the top of the page.
You can also browse all resources, or use the alphabetical list below the search bar to explore by letter. Databases provide access to a wide range of materials—such as primary sources, statistics, reports, and specialist collections—that can help you take your studies further.
Tip: You can access both your Subject Guide and the Online Resources A–Z from the Library homepage by selecting Online resources A–Z and guides.
When using search engines, it’s more effective to search with keywords or short phrases rather than full sentences. Start by picking out the main words from your topic or question.
Example:
Topic: "Discuss the prevalence of cheating in exams at University".
Keywords: cheating, exams, university.
Avoid including “filler” words that don’t add meaning (e.g. and, the, of), as they can clutter your results.
Search engines only retrieve the exact words you type. To improve your chances of finding useful results, try alternative keywords and synonyms, since different authors may use different terms for the same idea.
Examples:
Most search engines and research databases let you use special search commands to narrow down and improve your results. Here are some of the most useful ones:
| Phrase search | Put quotation marks around words to search for them as a phrase. Example: “climate change” → finds results where those two words appear together. |
| AND |
Use AND (in capital letters) between keywords to make sure your results include both terms. Example: revolution AND democracy → finds sources that mention both words. Tip: In most research databases, AND is automatic — so if you type two words with a space, the database treats it as if you wrote AND. |
| Truncation (*) |
Use an asterisk (*) at the end of a word to search for all its different endings. Example: decoloni → finds decolonial, decolonise, decolonised, decolonising, decolonisation. |
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, you can refine your results using filters. These help you cut out irrelevant results and focus on what’s most useful.
Some useful filters are:
Date filter: The date range you refine will depend on your subject and topic, but this can be a useful way to exclude irrelevant results.
Subject filter: Limit your results to a particular subject, or exclude results related to specific subjects. In library search, use the green tick boxes to include results only related to these subjects. Use the red cross (to the right of the word) to exclude subjects you don’t want to see.
| Include Subject | Exclude Subject |
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| Include Item Type | Exclude Item Type |
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Note: When you make changes to your search words or run a new search, your selected filters will reset automatically. To "lock" your filters in for the duration of a search session, select the ‘Remember all filters’ button:
Topic: Looking for journal articles on sleep and mental health in adolescents, published in the last 10 years.
Keywords: Sleep, Mental Health, Adolescents
Adding search commands: sleep* AND "mental health" AND adolescen*
Apply an 'article' filter and a date filter from 2015 to 2025.
Try out different searches by swapping in alternative keywords. e.g. insomia* AND "mental disorder" AND adolescen*
If the library has online access to a resource you will find a link under 'View Online' heading. You will need to be signed in or enter your University of Sussex credentials to access the resource.
Watch the video below to see for a more in-depth overview of how to access eBooks you have found using Library Search.
Welcome to our tutorial on accessing eBooks. In this video, we will look at how to access the ebooks that you want to use during your studies.
Let's start by heading to the university's library homepage and scrolling down to Library Search, where we can then enter a relevant keyword for the topic we are interested in. So, for this video, we'll use the term ‘gentrification’. Once we hit search, we'll be taken to our list of results. As we can see here, we have over 10,000 results for this particular keyword. And already we can see a couple of books at the top of our results. But if we are looking specifically for books with this search, we can head over to the filters on the left hand side and within the Item Type filters, we can add the books filter to narrow our results to only show us books. This reduces our number of results significantly and makes browsing the results a lot more manageable.
As we look at our results, we can tell which of the items are ebooks as they will be labelled with either 'Online access' or 'Full text available' underneath the title. This tells us that these items will be available electronically as ebooks. On the other hand, any books you come across labelled with a small book icon and 'Available at library' along with some location information, will be physical books that will be found on the shelves within the library building itself. It's worth noting that when an item has the 'See all versions' label above the title, this means that as well as the electronic version, there will also be a print version of the book, which we can see here. So for this item, you can decide which you'd rather work with. If we now head back to our list of results.
So, let's imagine that this item, Gentrification by Lees, Slater and Wyly is a book we're interested in. How do we go about accessing it? First off, let's click on the title to open up the item details. From here, we can scroll down to see a description of the book along with various other bits of information. And if we scroll back up to View Online and we click on the 'View full text' option, this will take us through to the ebook on whichever ebook platform it's being hosted. So, in this case it's taken us to ProQuest's Ebook Central.
And when it comes to accessing the book, we've got a few different options. So, if we select the 'Read Online' option, the book will open up in our browser and we're free to start scrolling through the pages. We also get a number of navigation options on the left hand side. So rather than scrolling through the whole book, we can use the table of contents to jump straight to a particular chapter that we're interested in. For example, chapter two 'Producing Gentrification'. By clicking on it, it will take us straight there.
Alternatively, we can use the 'Search within book' option to search for keywords within the book. For example, if we were particularly interested in gentrification within London, we could try search for the keyword 'London'. And not only will Ebook Central tell us how many times the word appears within the book, it will also break down how often the word appears in the different chapters.
We can then click on a chapter where our word has appeared frequently. Chapter four, here, for example. And then be shown how many times London has appeared on each page. So if we click on page 133 which mentions London six times, we are taken straight to the page. We can scroll down and we can see our keyword highlighted in the text. This is often a nice way to quickly see how relevant a book or a particular chapter is to our topic.
If we now click on 'Book Details' on the left and on 'More...', we will be taken back to the main landing page.
As well as reading online, we also have two options to download content from the book. We would almost always recommend 'Download PDF Chapter' as the better option. The best way to do this is to scroll down the page to the table of contents and select the chapter that you are interested in. So, for our example, we'll go for chapter four as we've just seen how relevant it looks to our topic. So, if we hit 'Download PDF', and just select 'Download'. We'll now have a PDF copy of the chapter that we can open in whichever PDF reader we normally use.
The big benefit of downloading single chapters is that this PDF is now yours to keep on your device. It's important to note, though, that each book will have a different allowance for how many pages you can download due to the copyright. So, we can see that with this book our allowance was 85 pages, but this has now dropped to 51 after we downloaded chapter four. This would mean we still have enough allowance to download at least one more chapter. It's also worth returning to the ebook at a later date, as often, these allowances will renew.
The reason we would normally advise against using the 'Download Book' option to download the whole book is that rather than download, we are, in effect, loaning the book for a specific amount of time, often just 24 hours. So, while we do get the whole book on our device, it will disappear after the loan comes to an end. Downloading the book will also require us to install extra software to open the book on our device.
Before we finish, it's worth noting that while Ebook Central is probably the most common platform for ebooks, you will invariably come across a number of other e-book platforms during your studies. For example, Cambridge Core, JSTOR, EBSCO, among several others. And while we cannot cover all of these providers, almost all of these platforms will have similar functionality to what we've just covered in Ebook Central, and all should allow you to download PDF chapters.
That's all for this video on accessing ebooks. Thank you for watching.
Watch the video below to see for a more in-depth overview of how to access Journal Articles you have found using Library Search.
In this video, we'll look at how you can use library search to search specifically for journal articles related to your topic.
To start finding journal articles in Library Search, we will start by running a search using keywords from the topic I'm interested in. For this example, let's imagine I am looking for academic research on smart cities.
I can start by simply searching for these key terms in the library search bar.
To begin with, Library Search is giving us just over 87,000 results and this will include all item types, but if I want to focus on journal articles, I can add the 'Articles' filter here on the left-hand side, reducing my results to around 50,000.
At this stage, I may want to filter my results further, for example, I could use the 'Creation Date' filter to only see research from the last ten years. To do this, I would change the 'From' year from 1701 to 2015 and then hit 'Refine'.
If we look in our active filters, we can now see we are only seeing results that are journal articles from the years 2015 to 2026.
I can now start browsing through the results to see if there are any articles I find interesting. And once you find something you'd like to read more about, let's say I like the look of this one on 'Smart cities: Between worlding and provincialising', you just need to click on the title to see the item details.
On this page, as well as the article's title, its authors, and the academic journal the article appears in, we can also scroll down to see a description or abstract of the article, which we can read to check the article sounds relevant to our topic.
We can then scroll back up and use any of the 'View Online' links to open the article up inside its journal landing page.
So let's try that now.
At this point, you will be asked to sign in using your University of Sussex credentials, unless you were already signed in to Library Search.
Once you've entered your details, you will then be taken to the article within its journal landing page.
From here I can either read the whole article in my browser, or I can download the article as a PDF, and I can then read it, save it for later or print it off in this format.
I can then return to my search results to see which other articles I would like to read.
That's all for this video, thanks for watching.
As your research progresses, you'll want to use more advanced ways of searching. The next section introduces citation searching and advanced searching techniques.