Nearly every area of study has some kind of authoritative subject index. For example, psychology has APA PsycInfo, language and literature have MLA International Bibliography, and allied health has CINAHL. In essence, subject indexes are high-quality mini-discovery services for their disciplines.
EBSCO Discovery Service is the only discovery service that properly leverages native MeSH, CINAHL, APA and other thesauri and controlled vocabularies to connect these different terminologies. All headings are hyperlinked for easier serendipitous discovery.
Subject index providers do not typically provide metadata to services that do not properly leverage their indexing and controlled vocabularies.
Relevance Priorities
EBSCO Discovery Service has no bias toward content from any provider. Search results are prioritized by:
- Match on subject headings from controlled vocabularies
- Match on article titles
- Match on author keywords
- Match on keywords within abstracts
- Match on keywords within full text
Value Priorities
Recency/currency — Recently published content is scored higher for value than older content.
Document type — Certain document types are weighted higher than others. For example, “review articles” are considered valuable. “Book reviews” are not considered valuable. If the word “book” or “review” is not searched, there is a bias against book reviews, so these don’t dominate results.
Document length — Documents of a more substantial length are more valuable. For example, a quarter-page article is considered less valuable than a four-page research paper.
Subject Mapping in Action
Subject indexes contain controlled vocabularies, which link concepts with different terminology. EDS includes complex mapping technology to leverage and connect these for improved search results.
For example, a search for “learning aids” maps to:
- Instructional materials (ERIC, MLA International Bibliography)
- Educational resources (GeoRef)
- Instructional media (APA PsycInfo)
- Teaching aids & devices (Education Abstracts, Education Source)
- Teaching materials (MeSH/MEDLINE/PubMed, CINAHL)
Users may revert to original search terms only, but user research shows that users prefer their search results fine-tuned by subject mapping.
A Search Experience That Users Expect
EBSCO Discovery Service anticipates user intent by providing relevant results when a user searches for a publication name, database name, popular topic or library hours.
EDS further predicts an intended query through autocomplete and autocorrect and offers support for all major languages.
“We were impressed with the EDS relevancy ranking system as it returned the best results.”
— Dr. Adolfo Rodríguez Gallardo, Former Director General of Libraries, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (the largest university in Latin America)
“Our students and faculty expect the most relevant and valuable results to appear at the top of the result list, and EDS does a superior job in this regard.”
— Kristin Antelman, University Librarian, California Institute of Technology (Caltech)