Research Guides: Education *: Finding Research Materials

3 things to remember!

When using article databases, remember there are always three stages in your workflow:

1) Discovery: Do (and redo!) your searching, using varying terms and combining using the Boolean operators "and, or, not" to get good results. Your first search is not your best search, but rather an opportunity to learn how to immediately do a better search.

2) Delivery: For items that you like, select the link to the full-text if available, or click on the button to see if we own the item. If you want to keep this item, either save it to your own computer, email it to yourself, or print it.

3) Organize it: Keep the "meta-information" about all the resources you found for your records and to make your bibliographies. You will find yourself returning to resources so having a system in place will save you time and aggravation later. USC Libraries has a subscription to the citation manager, RefWorks, that will help you organize the information you're collecting. For more information on other citation managers, check out this page.

Source

Content in this guide has been adapted with permission from Scott Collard's NYU Libraries Education guide.

Article databases

The article databases listed below allow you to search for articles through multiple journals simultaneously. Click on the name of the database below to start searching. If you're off-campus, you'll be asked to log-in using your USC ID and password.

ERIC (ProQuest)
Main database for education research. Database includes journal articles, conference proceedings, government documents and dissertations. Maintained by the Dept of Education.

ERIC provides coverage of journal articles, conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books and monographs. Included is the ERIC Thesaurus under the Search Tools tab.Coverage: 1966 to present
Education Source
Includes full-text for education journals, and encompasses an international array of English-language periodicals, monographs, yearbooks and more. Coverage in Education Source spans all levels of education—from early childhood to higher education—as well as all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education and testing.

Content Includes:Full text for more than 1,900 journals; Indexing and abstracts for more than 3,500 journals; Full text for more than 550 books and monographs; Full text for numerous education-related conference papers; and citations for more than 5.5 million articles, including book reviews.
PsycINFO
Abstracting and indexing database with more than 3 million records devoted to peer-reviewed literature of journal articles, chapters, books, dissertations and reports in psychology, the behavioral sciences, and mental health.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is multidisciplinary and enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed articles, books and theses. To set USC as your school, click on Scholar Preferences. Next enter USC into the search box, and click Find Library. Select University of Southern California, then click Save Preferences.

Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Once you set your institutional preferences, links to fulltext, if available at USC, should appear.

To set preferences, click on Scholar Preferences. Next enter USC into the search box, and click Find Library. Select University of Southern California, then click Save Preferences.
Web of Science
Multidisciplinary database that provides citations covering high-impact journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as international conference proceedings.

Includes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded); Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI); Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI); Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Science (CPCI-S); Conference Proceedings Citation Index - Social Sciences & Humanities (CPCI-SSH); Index Chemicus (IC); and Current Chemical Reactions (CCR-Expanded). Powerful tools include cited reference searching, Citation Maps, and the Analyze Tool.
Scopus
Contains abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. It covers nearly titles 20,000 peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical, and social sciences (including arts and humanities).
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global
Comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day and offering full text for graduate works added since 1997, along with selected full text for works written prior to 1997.

It contains a significant amount of new international dissertations and theses both in citations and in full text.
PAIS Index
Good resource for policy issues related to education. International in scope, with coverage of journal resources as well as "gray literature" like government information.

The system provides selective subjects and bibliographic access to periodicals, books, hearings, reports, gray literature, government publications, Internet resources, and other publications from 120 countries. Materials are in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish with English language abstracts and subject headings. The database contains more than 480,000 records, each with bibliographic information and brief, descriptive abstracts and includses coverage from 1915 to the present.
America: History & Life with Full Text
Excellent coverage of history of American education.

Finding books

Find a book by title

1. Go to the home page of the library: libraries.usc.edu

2. Click on Refine Your Search link underneath the white search box (this will bring up a menu).

3. Select Books.

4. Input title of the book and click search (magnifying glass).

5. If we have the book in library's collection, you'll see a link on the results list.

Find a book by topic

1. Go to the home page of the library: libraries.usc.edu

2. Click on Refine Your Search link underneath the white search box (this will bring up a menu).

3. Select E-Books.

4. Type in terms to describe the topic (Example: "common core standards")

Tip: Use quotation marks for phrases.

4. Click Search (magnifying glass).

If the library does not have the book you need, you can request it through interlibrary loan or recommend we add it to the library's collection.