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Literature Reviews for Education: Find Articles

Databases By Topic

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Search Tips By Database

 

How To Search in EBSCO
  • Select AND dropdown to change your operator to OR or NOT
  • Add new lines with the + symbol to include additional keywords/phrases
  • If you get an error message, try re-running your search. Make sure you don't have any AND, OR, NOT Boolean operators duplicated, as that could be causing the error. 
Filter / limit search by: 
  • Peer-reviewed journals only
  • Full text only
  • Document type (multi-select)
  • Publish date (input a month and year range)

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.

How To Search ERIC.ed.gov
  • The freely available version of ERIC at eric.ed.gov will look for your search terms in the following fields: 
    • Title, author, source, abstract and descriptor
  • You can also search directly in the search box by ERIC ID, ISBN, ISSN, EISSN or IES Grant/Contract Number
  • Accepts "" to group exact words into phrases
  • Accepts AND/OR operators
  • Instead of NOT, uses - symbol to indicate that word after it should be excluded from results
    • example: achievement tests -NAEP would exclude results that have NAEP 
 
Advanced Search
Advanced Search Top Tips
  • To change your operators, select AND dropdown to change your operator to OR or NOT
  • Add new rows to include additional keywords/phrases
  • Easily filter for peer-reviewed resources by selecting that checkbox

 

What Part of the Document to Search

By 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. 

 
Filter By Education Level

One filter unique to ERIC ProQuest is the Education Level filter in Advanced Search. 

 
Other search filters: 
  • Full text only
  • Source type (multi-select)
  • Document type (multi-select)
  • Publication date (select or input a range)
  • Language (multi-select)
Basic Search

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. 

 

Advanced Search

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.

 

More on Boolean Operators, Wildcards

Understanding Existing Research

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. 

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.