Search Skills

We recommend signing in to library search using your University of Sussex login, because this will allow you to pin results to your favourites and save your searches. You can also create an account, sign in and save results and searches in most other research databases. 

To sign in to library search, click on Sign in option in the top left. 

To save a result, use the pin icon in the top corner of the result’s record. 

You can also save multiple results in at once. Tick the number in the top right corner of each record for the results you’d like to save, then click the pin icon at which appears at the top of your results list.  

After running a search, use the ‘Save search’ button in the centre at the top of your results list to add that search to your favourites. 

To view your favourites, click on the pin icon in the top right corner, next to your name. 

Then scroll down past the search menu to the ‘My favourites section’. Select the ‘Saved records’ tab to see any results you’ve saved or the 'Saved searches' tab to view and re-run your saved searches.  

You can also add a label to any results you’ve saved and then use the labels filter on the right to view only results with those labels.  

This is great for organising your results, either by assignment, topic or theme. 

For longer and more in-depth research projects, like a dissertation, managing results becomes even more important. 

Reference management software not only helps with creating accurate bibliographies and citations easily but allows you to save articles and sources to your own personal library which you can then organise into folders.  

There are a few different types of reference management software, and what’s best for you will depend on how you like to work and what kind of computer, browser and word processing software you use. 

One piece of reference management software the University of Sussex supports is Zotero. For more information and guidance on how to install and start using Zotero, see our Zotero guide.