EBSCO have improved the way the e-journals A-to-Z carries out journal title keyword searches.
Previously, the A-to-Z only matched on exact, ‘whole word’ searches; it was very unforgiving. Searching for science would not return results containing the word sciences. Stemmed / partial-word searching was (and still is) possible using an asterisk as a wildcard—e.g. scien* would return results containing science, sciences, scientific, scientist, etc.—but these kinds of search features don’t tend to be very popular with library users.
However, EBSCO have now introduced ‘stemming’ rules within the A-to-Z search engine. This handles singular and plural forms such as science/sciences, and make for a more forgiving search. It also now allows searching using common journal abbreviations such as Br J Sports Med for the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
We used to have a small number of custom ‘redirect’ entries in the A-to-Z which picked up common misspellings of certain journal titles (for example, Journal of Forensic Science instead of the—correct—Journal of Forensic Sciences). These are no longer necessary and I’ve removed them from the A-to-Z.
If you need it, exact-title searching is still possible via the advanced search page, and you can still use an asterisk for partial-keyword stem searches.
