Literature Search Strategies - EDCI 63800 - Spring 2022 Doctoral Seminar - Research Guides at Purdue University Libraries

Keyword Searching Tips

Constructing a Search Statement

Identifying the right terms and phrases for your topic is critical to successful searching. This worksheet may be helpful in organizing and recording your search terms and phrases:

Constructing a Search Statement

Tricks of the Trade

There are 4 quick tricks that work in most databases for keyword searching. Learn how to do them by viewing and listening to the 10-minute video tutorial created by the former Education librarian Judy Nixon, "Tricks of the Trade," which covers:

phrase searching
truncation (word stem searching)
Boolean logic (combining key words with AND and OR)
Nesting (grouping ideas)

A more recent video covering the "shotgun," "snowball," and "building blocks" approaches to searching is provided by Professor Heather Howard with Purdue's Parrish Library:

Creating a Search Strategy

Database-Specific Tips

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library has created a useful quick-guide for database searching according to vendors:

UIUC Database Quick Guide
Basic information on writing search queries in library databases. Intended audience: advanced searchers, or searchers interested in learning more about advanced searching options.

Using Journal Article Abstracts

The author of a published journal articles is usually required to submit an abstract to accompany their article. These abstracts are often included in the catalog record of articles in Article Databases, such as ERIC and Education Source.

Some Tips:

Reading article abstracts before committing to reading an article in its entirety can save time. An informative abstract of an article includes information that can help you determine whether or not the article is pertinent to your research topic.

The Advanced Search interface in EBSCO databases allows you to limit your keyword search to the "AB Abstract" field of an item's catalog record, enabling you to perform a more targeted search.

For details on using this option in EBSCO databases, please see EBSCO's help entry on Advanced Search on EBSCO Interfaces - Guided Style Field Searching.

Citation Searching - An Overview

What is citation searching?

Basic citation searching involves tracking references that have cited, or listed in its bibliography, an article, book, or book chapter.
This guide will help you find WHO HAS CITED a given article, book, book chapter, or other publication or author - also known as cited reference searching.

Why do it?

To locate newer material related to a given publication or author.
To see who is citing one (or all) of your publication.
To show the impact of your work by seeing who is citing you. To find other researchers in a field.

Where to do citation searching?

Many databases have a "cited by" link.

Top ones for Education field are:

Web of Science: All Databases
Easily search across all subscribed products simultaneously using a common set of search fields for the most comprehensive results Including: Web of Science Core Collection, BIOSIS Citation Index, BIOSIS Previews, CAB eBooks Archive, CABI, CAB Abstracts and Global Health, Current Contents Connect, Data Citation Index, Derwent Innovations Index, FSTA-the food science resource, KCI-Korean Journal Database, MEDLINE, Preprint Citation Index, SciELO Citation Index, and Zoological Record.
Google Scholar
Searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Academic Search Complete is a general academic index that indexes more than 8,200 magazines and journals from every academic discipline and provides the full-text of more than 4,600.

In addition, Academic Search Complete offers access to more than 75,000 videos from the Associated Press. Videos relevant to the search terms will appear in a carousel in the result list.
PsycINFO
This database contains more than one million citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports, all in the field of psychology. It also includes information about the psychological aspects of related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business and law. Journal coverage, which spans from 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 1,700 periodicals in over 35 languages.
JSTOR
Full-text digital archive of over 2600 scholarly journals, especially strong in Social Sciences, Humanities, Economics, and Mathematics.