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Search tips

BIDS bibliographic services offer the research community a powerful source of online information. Use these search tips to maximise the research potential of your chosen service.

BIDS CAB Abstracts
Anybody belonging to a licensed institution has free and unlimited access to the BIDS CAB Abstracts service. It is available (with a few exceptions) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To access the service, login at www.bids.ac.uk with an Athens user name and password, and select BIDS CAB Abstracts.

Features of the BIDS/CABI service include:

  • Online context sensitive help
  • Linking to article full text where items also appear in the ingentaJournals service (most articles in PDF format)
  • Bibliographic details and abstracts of search results can be displayed, downloaded and emailed   

BIDS Education
The Ovid interface offers a variety of search, display and output options. Search options include:

  • words or phrases in text fields (article titles, abstracts, subject headings etc)
  • subject headings
  • author names
  • journal names
  • thesaurus terms
The ERIC thesaurus allows you to search for specific concepts in education and for groups of related subjects. You may also limit searches by eg: educational level, publication type or language. Bibliographic details and abstracts of your search results can be displayed, printed, saved or emailed. Result sets can be sorted by author, title, source, country of publication, date of publication etc. Searches can also be saved and then rerun at a later date.

BIDS IBSS
No experience of online searching is required to make effective use of the service. You can search BIDS IBSS by using:

  • words or phrases in article titles or abstracts
  • author names
  • journal names
  • book details
  • keywords
Searches can also be saved and then rerun at a later date. Bibliographic details and abstracts (where available) can be displayed, downloaded and emailed. Electronic full-text articles may also be available in the BIDS IBSS web services.

BIDS INSPEC
The INSPEC service is available with a user-friendly SPIRS search interface from SilverPlatter. Created for both novice and advanced users, SPIRS is designed for optimal search effectiveness with minimal user training. SPIRS is available on a range of clients, including Web, Windows, Macintosh and Z39.50.