Federated searching

"Federated searching," also known as "cross searching," refers to the ability to search across two or more databases simultaneously. Several UMUC library vendors allow federated searching, including EBSCO and ProQuest. Federated searching across databases produced by different vendors can be accomplished in Research Port.

Federated searching in EBSCO databases

Federated searching in ProQuest databases

After clicking on Select multiple databases, you'll be taken to a page where you can select the database(s) that you want to search across. Note that the historical New York Times (1851-2004) and historical Wall Street Journal (1889-1990) cannot be searched in combination with non-historical databases. (The current New York Times database covers 1980 through the present, and the current Wall Street Journal covers 1984 through the present.)

Federated searching in Research Port

To get to Research Port from the library's home page, click on Articles and More and then on Research Port (link is available in the second bullet point under the Library Databases by Title heading).

Clicking on Research Port will take you to the Databases tab. Click on "See all categories" to see a list of all available subject categories.

Select a subject category. For this example, the Business and Marketing subject category was selected.

Each subject category is broken up into subcategories. The Business and Marketing subject category has five different subcategories. The number in parentheses after the subcategory name indicates the number of databases in that subcategory.

In order to search across multiple databases in a particular subcategory, click on Cross Search multiple databases.

The Cross Search page will tell how many of the databases in the subcategory are capable of being cross searched. First, select up to eight databases to search across. Click on the "i" button next to each database's name to get more information about the database. Next, enter your search terms in the blank boxes and select search fields and/or Boolean operators. Click on "search selected databases" to run your search.

Note that Research Port offers many fewer options for searching than do the native interfaces of the databases, so Research Port is useful for running only very basic searches. If you want to run a more advanced search, we recommend that you do so from the vendor's version of the database.

As Research Port searches the databases that you selected, the number of matching articles for each database will be shown in the "Hits" column.

Once Research Port has finished searching across the databases that you selected, you will be taken automatically to a page showing your search results. The number of articles found in the selected databases will be shown at the top left-hand corner of the page. Note that, in order to increase retrieval speed, in many cases only a small fraction of the number of search results will be retrieved. You may click on "increase number of results shown" to see more search results, but this may dramatically increase the load time of the search results page.

Note, too, that you may narrow your search results by topic (and then by subtopic), publication year, and/or journal title.

You may work with your search results in a variety of ways.