The most comprehensive Education databases we have for coverage of scholarly journal articles are Education Collection (ProQuest) and Education Source Ultimate (EBSCO). They also include scholarly books and reports.
Collection containing articles covering special education, educational tests, adult education, multicultural education, teaching methods, and more.
If you're incorporating frameworks or research from other disciplines like linguistics or social work, you may want to conduct a search in a broader database that will cover both education research as well as a range of social sciences research. The following two databases include our most comprehensive Education databases.
The following databases will not offer enough resources for comprehensive coverage of your topic, but may be helpful in addition to your main search or for finding background reading.
One strategy for writing your literature review is to start with one article that interests you, and to expand your search from there. That article is sometimes called an anchor article, key article, or a hook. However you think about it, this article should draw you in and get you excited to read more!
Reading literature reviews related to your topic gives you a good idea of where there are gaps in method, framework or theory where your topic will be original, or whether you might be contributing originality to the field by writing an update to a previous review. They can also make a great "key" article to branch out from.
To find reviews, try adding "literature review", "scoping review", "systemic review", or "meta-analysis" to your search. You can do this using the AND operator or add them as a subject, depending on the specific library database.
Or, search specifically in databases or journals that focus on review articles, like the following resources:
In Google Scholar, to forward citation chain, click on the "cited by" link under the article abstract.
Title Search: When searching for a title in a language other than English, enclose the title in quotation marks. This ensures that a non-English word such as "de" or "su" is not interpreted as a two-letter search tag.
What Part of the Document to SearchBy default, ERIC ProQuest will look for your search terms anywhere except the full text. This is called "Anywhere except full text - NOFT" which is the default search parameter. You can change that by selecting another parameter from the dropdown as shown on the right. Anywhere - choose to search anywhere in the document with caution - that option will also search full text so it may give you irrelevant results, but if you're looking to broaden your search, it's one strategy you might try.
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Filter By Education LevelOne filter unique to ERIC ProQuest is the Education Level filter in Advanced Search.
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Similar to other databases, you build your search string by entering keywords or phrases on each line, using the add row button to add additional keywords/phrases. Select the All Fields dropdown to change
By default Web of Science will search Web of Science Core Collection. By clicking on that dropdown, you can change to another collection, or choose All Databases. Hovering over each collection in the dropdown shows the date range and scope of that collection.
Web of Science Advanced Search builds on the same way of inputting search terms row by row, but gives you the option to first build your query and see it in a preview box before searching.
You can also type your entire search in the query builder using field tags.