Q. How can I access my EBSCOhost account for saving searches and results, and accessing things I've saved in the past?

Why save searches and results?

The ability to save your searches and results in databases is valuable for being able to develop searches over time, and for rerunning and/or exporting them at a later date.

This is useful for many purposes, including searching and reporting in systematic reviews, and doing a keyword search in a list of saved journals. It also enables you to set up alerts so that you can be emailed when new issues of a journal you are interested in are published, or when new articles are published that meet your search criteria. 

Whether and how you can save searches varies between databases.

EBSCOhost databases

To save searches in databases on the EBSCOhost platform (such as Business Source Premier, Academic Search Complete, APA PsycInfo, CINAHL Plus... though there are more - Brunel subscribes to over twenty of them), you need to deliberately set up an account. This is a separate process from accessing the database to search in it.

Creating an EBSCOhost account

To sign in to your EBSCOhost account, once you're in the database, you should select Sign In (at the top of the page), and then Create an account. The username and password you create for this will be separate from the Student number/Staff username and password you use to login to the university network.

Accessing older EBSCOhost accounts

If you set up a new EBSCOhost account now, or have set one up recently, you should be able to sign in to your account with no problem. However, if your account was created quite a while ago, you probably get an error message when you try to sign in. This is an ongoing issue that we hope will be resolved when we switch to the new EBSCO platform - probably later in 2025. There is a workaround for this problem, involving accessing via CINAHL and switching databases. If you are unsure, use the following step by step instructions:

1. Ensure you are logged in to the university network by going to the Brunel Library website and selecting Login to access online Library resources (above the search box). If you are not already logged in, you will be prompted to enter your student number/staff username and password.
2. Scroll down the page and select Databases A-Z (under the search box), then select C in the A-Z list. CINAHL Plus is about halfway down the list of databases beginning with C. Open it up.
3. Once in CINAHL Plus, click Sign In, in the blue bar at the top of the page and enter your EBSCOhost login details (or it's at this point that you can Create an account if you don't have one already).
4. If you want to search in CINAHL, you can do this. Or you can now switch to the EBSCOhost database that you want to use.
5. Next to the CINAHL Plus heading (above the search boxes) is the option to Choose Databases. From the list of databases untick CINAHL, tick the database or databases that you want to search, and select OK. (Note that, while you can search in multiple databases at the same time, there will be a loss in some search functionality if you do this).
6. You can now select Folder, at the top of the screen and your saved searches/results from previous occasions will be listed. Or carry out your search, and select Search History (underneath the search boxes) to see your searches in this session, tick one or more of them, and select Save searches/alerts (at the top of the list of searches).
7. While signed in, you can add items to Folder from the search results list by clicking on the + folder icon, and select Folder View, where you can sort, save and email articles to yourself.

For further guidance on signing in to EBSCO databases, and making use of the wide range of search functionality, get in touch with your Academic Liaison Librarian