EDUC: Education Research Resources

As you think about your topic, work to distill your ideas into keywords. When developing keywords, you don't need to include words like "cause," "effect," "impact," or "relationship."

As you think about your topic, you can make it more specific by considering any of the following facets:

• Academic environment or educational context
• Age level
• Assessment or testing
• Curriculum
• Educational roles
• Educational programs
• Geographic location
• Research method(s)
• Student characteristics, identity, or demographics
• Teaching method(s)

Articles in library databases are tagged with subject terms. Using subject terms as part of your search strategy can take the guesswork out of keyword searching.

You can discover subject terms as you search, by looking for them under the article title in your results list, or above the abstract in an article record page.

You can also look up subject terms in a database's thesaurus. Here's a video explaining how to search for subject terms in EBSCO databases.

Finally, you can search using subject terms by clicking on them, or changing your search field to subject terms.

Boolean operators are terms you can use to narrow or broaden your search in a database, library catalog, or a search engine like Google. The three basic operators are: AND, OR, and NOT.  

Why use them?

• To focus a search when you are using multiple terms 
• To include synonyms for your search terms in order to find all variations  
• To exclude terms not relevant to your search

When using Boolean logic to create a search strategy, use double quotation marks (" ") when you are searching for a phrase (words you'd like to keep together).

Using AND

Use the operator "AND" in a search to: 

• Narrow your results 
• Tell the database that ALL the terms must be present in the search results 

Example: california AND "secondary education"

Using OR

Use the operator OR to: 

• Broaden your search by telling the database that ANY of the terms can be present in your results 
• To include synonyms or related concepts for your search terms 

Example: "high school" OR "secondary education"

Using NOT

Use the operator NOT to: 

• Narrow your results  
• Exclude specific words or concepts from your search results 

Example: student AND "mental health" NOT anxiety

Nesting Operators

• Databases usually default to AND as the primary operator and connect concepts tied together with AND first. You can use parentheses ( ) to indicate to the database how you want your terms to be connected.  
• You can put operators together like an algebra equation.

Example: ("mental health" OR anxiety OR depression) AND ("high school" OR secondary) AND student

"Citation chaining" refers to the process of using sources to find more sources. There are two approaches – forward and backward chaining.

Backward chaining

This approach uses one relevant source, or citation, to find more relevant sources on a topic by investigating who published on that particular topic before it was published. You can do this by scanning the works cited list at the end of an article and/or close-reading its literature review section.

Forward chaining

Some databases of scholarly articles will include a "cited by" feature, to let you know who referenced that particular article after it was published.

Google Scholar is one tool for forward chaining. Search for the title of an article, and click the "Cited by..." button underneath it.

This will bring up a set of results of citing literature. If you want to search within these results, check the box next to "Search within citing articles" and then enter your search terms in the bar above.

Web of Science is another database that can help you with citation chaining. It features citing literature ("Citations"), referenced literature ("References), citation maps ("Co-citation map"), and a filter to help you identify highly-cited papers within your search results.

Reading Academic Literature

Brush up on the parts of scholarly articles using this interactive tutorial from NC State University Libraries.

Learn strategies for structural reading of scholarly articles in this guide from ICPSR.

Organizing Your Sources

Use the templates below to help organize your sources.

Citation Managers

If you plan to develop a research library to support your future clinical practice, EndNote or Zotero could be useful tools to consider. These citation managers help you organize, share, and cite materials.

Zotero

Zotero is a free and open-source citation manager. It is the citation manager supported by SCU Library.

Using Zotero you can:

• Save and organize sources
• Create in-text citations in Word and Google Docs
• Sync your references for online access on any device
• Create a bibliography with a single click

Zotero also has a free, web-based citation generator called ZoteroBib. This tool is an ad-free alternative to other citation websites.

EndNote

EndNote is another popular citation manager, which has reduced cost student licenses available.

EndNote Web is a free, less powerful version of EndNote that provides most of the essential features.