Research Guides: Literature Reviews for Education: Finding Articles

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Choosing a Search Tool

Databases

ERIC (Proquest)
The U.S. Department of Education sponsors this comprehensive database of education literature.
Education Source Ultimate (EBSCO)
Collection containing articles covering special education, educational tests, adult education, multicultural education, teaching methods, and more.

Sage Education Journals
SAGE Education Journals has major publications from AERA and many more!

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) (ProQuest)
Includes descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical, and geographical linguistics.
Social Sciences Full Text (EBSCO)
Scholarly articles in the fields of addition studies, anthropology, criminology, economics, family studies, gerontology, ethnic studies, political science, psychology, social work, and urban studies. Includes the following collections: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson), Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson)
Web of Science, Web of Science database
Interdisciplinary index that provides citations for high impact journals. Useful for forward citation searching. Includes some indexing and full-text linking for ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
Access note: To access the API, set up your account and select "Web of Science API Lite" at Step 3 “Subscribe to an API.” For research support using the API, please contact the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship.

AI Tools

Semantic Scholar
An AI-powered research search engine for finding relevant papers and articles.
Inciteful
Start your search with one paper, and find more through Inciteful's Paper Discovery and Literature Connector tools. The Literature Connector was designed for interdisciplinary research.
Research Rabbit
Best for visualizing connections between articles or authors. Create a collection, then search by keyword, DOI, or export from a citation manager to add articles. See similar, earlier, or later work, and explore other suggested sources.
More information on AI Tools for literature reviews

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.

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.

Literature Reviews for Education