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Ebsco Describes Itself As ‘The Leading Discovery Service

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EBSCO describes itself as ‘the leading discovery service provider for libraries worldwide with more than 8,000 discovery customers in over 100 countries. EBSCO Discovery Service™ provides each institution with a comprehensive, single search box for its entire collection, offering unparalleled relevance ranking quality and extensive customization.’ (EBSCO, 2015) This all sounds very impressive but how does it stand up in comparison to other databases and just how easy is it use? This review will set out to show the advantages and disadvantages of using EBSCO Host and what it has to offer.
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EBSCO Host acts as a platform for a varied collection of databases. This resource allows the user to browse across multiple databases with a …show more content…

A quick keyword search using the term ‘business’ brought up 8,952,111 results as you can see in the accompanying screenshot. The impressive date range stretches from the year 1644 to 2016. This is of course too much information to sort through but on the left hand side of the page, EBSCO offers a range of refining features to narrow your search term. However not all of the refining features work as they should. For example, the geography filter is not the most accurate, there is uncertainty if geography is categorised by topic, publisher or author. Furthermore when a geographical location is selected, the results are inaccurate, although this is mainly because the databases which EBSCO searches through do not always accurately define the article’s location. (EBSCO Host, 2016)
One of the advantages of this platform is its thesaurus and predictive search terms which allow you to search at ease. Other databases for example Passport are only capable of searching an exact phrase in an exact term. EBSCO Host manages to predict your search, or similar searches which helps those who may lack confidence. EBSCO states that its ‘neutral relevance ranking strategy uses numerous criteria, including term frequency, field weighting, exact title matching and content attribute boosting, to provide users with the most relevant results for each query’ (Kelley, 2013). I feel that this is something that EBSCO Host does successfully. Each search I

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