Use a range of tools from the discipline for comprehensive results.
The Educational Research Guide is designed for FoE graduate research students and research staff. This guide identifies relevant databases and search tools for locating educational research literature.
Searching for the literature, (after identifying the concepts involved within the parameters of your study), can consist of a mix of these:
A selection of specialist subject database/indexes - see the core education databases list
The use of multi-disciplinary databases/indexes - see the multi-disciplinary search tools list
Specialised registers of reviews and trials or specific grey literature sources
Library catalogues
Hand searching
Reference list checking
Contact with experts and other personal contacts
Internet searching
The same database may be supplied by different commercial entities or associations. The operation of commands, operators, truncation symbols and proximity operators as well as available search fields may differ from provider to provider. As a result search strategies requires customisation to suit each of the different database (company) interfaces.
If you need to explore additional databases for your review, a comparison list of databases and grey literature sources can be found in section 2 (Resource list) in the 'Planning a review of the literature' resource.
This short tutorial provides an overview of the benefits of using these tools and will guide you with the database selection phase. We recommend using the list of databases on the Educational research guide https://unimelb.libguides.com/ednresearch/ednresearch-databases