Scholarly Article Databases
- Education Research Complete This link opens in a new window
Indexes journal articles, books, and conference papers covering all levels of education from early childhood to higher education, and all areas including curriculum, administration, policy, funding, testing, and related social issues. Indexes over 1,500 journals, with full text for more than 750 journals.
- Education Full Text This link opens in a new window
Indexes articles from education journals and books. Topics include teaching methods, multicultural/ethnic education, alternative and comparative education, testing, policy issues, teacher evaluation, school administration, higher education, and more. Selective access to full-text articles from about 350 journals. Dates of coverage: 1983 to date
- ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) This link opens in a new window
The world's largest source of education information, with indexing and detailed descriptions of over 1.4 million journal articles, books, documents, research reports, surveys, curriculum and teaching guides, instructional materials, position papers, program overviews, conference papers, and other resource materials. All areas of education research and practice are included. Many items include full text. Maintained by the U.S. Dept. of Education. Dates of Coverage: 1966 to date
- PsycInfo This link opens in a new window
Indexes scholarly literature in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences; covers journals, books, reviews, and dissertations. Dates of coverage: 1880s–present.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Scholarly literature in the sciences, health and medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities and proceedings of international conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions. Includes cited reference searching across many databases. Search all databases in Web of Science (includes Medline and BIOSIS, direct link for on-campus users). Dates of coverage: 1965 to present.
- RILM Full Text This link opens in a new windowComprehensive music bibliography providing international coverage of music literature. Dates of coverage: 1775 to the present.
- Music Index Online This link opens in a new window
Music Index Online covers topics concerned with every aspect of the classical and popular world of music. Dates of coverage: 1979-present.
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Scholarly literature in the sciences, health and medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities and proceedings of international conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions. Includes cited reference searching across many databases. Search all databases in Web of Science (includes Medline and BIOSIS, direct link for on-campus users). Dates of coverage: 1965 to present.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary - good for nearly all subjects. Scholarly and trade journals, popular magazines, newspapers, conference proceedings, book reviews, and more.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowScholarly journal archive for the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences; current issues (usually the last 2-5 years) are not digitized by JSTOR and may be obtained elsewhere.
- Summon This link opens in a new windowSearches more than 300 million items - books, scholarly articles, newspaper articles, data, digital audio, digital video, digital images, government documents and more. It draws from the library catalog (OBIS), many of the full text and article indexing databases, as well as digital repositories from colleges, universities, research centers, and other open-access archives on the web.
PhD Dissertations and MA Theses
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I This link opens in a new window
Citations and abstracts for dissertations and theses on all subjects from around the world. Previews and full text available for some titles.
Types of Scholarly Articles
When you're in a database, your results will include different types of articles--all of which can help you with your research in different ways. Two common types with usefulness for this class include:
Empirical Articles
These articles share the results of original research in which the authors collected data. Their authors will describe their research method and findings, including results, data, and ideas for future research. In the article's abstract, look for words like "study" or "studies" and information on the population studied and the findings.
Review Articles
Review articles are written to provide an overview or synthesis of multiple studies around a topic or area of research. They may have a similar structure to empirical articles, but they will describe what others have found. They will not collect their own data or run a study. In the abstract, look for terms like review or literature review.
Practitioner Articles
Practitioner articles are written by educators in the field (and sometimes by researchers) as practical guidance for other educators. They discuss classroom experiences, share teaching tips, and are usually short and have a conversational tone. Although they are not reporting on studies or reviewing the scholarly literature, they may provide classroom context for your topic or language to use in your searches.
Parts of a Scholarly Article
In the Sciences (Biology, Chemistry, etc.) and Social Sciences (Psychology, Sociology, etc.), scholarly articles in academic journals will often share a similar structure. Knowing the structure can help you to make sense of the article and find key pieces of information.
|
Abstract |
Brief summary of the article. |
| Introduction | States the topic, purpose, and argument of the article. |
| Methods | Mentions steps taken to support argument of the article. |
| Results/Findings | Shares results of the research. |
| Discussion | Analyzes and talks about the findings of the research. |
| Conclusion | Synthesizes the article's findings and argument. |
| References | List of cited sources. |