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Course & Subject Guides

Education Research - Oakland Campus

This guide is designed to help students in the School of Education with their Masters or PhD. level research.

How do I Find Articles . .

If you’re looking for articles on a topic, search an Article Database.

Databases are collections of articles that you can search by topic or subject.  Find a specific database in the Databases A-Z list, or if you’re not sure which database to search, use the Subject drop-down list to narrow by subject.  If you need help, ask a librarian for guidance by chatting online at Ask Us.

If you have a citation to an article, search PittCat.

PittCat will list all the journals we subscribe to either online or in paper.  If the journal is online, the PittCat record will offer a link directly to the journal database.   If the ULS doesn’t subscribe to the journal online, PittCat will list any paper volumes and issues we have of that journal.

Try the E-journal search. 

You can search by the journal title to find out if we have a particular journal online.   Remember  that not all journals or issues of journals are available online.  To see if we have a journal either online or in paper, search PittCat for the journal title.

If we don’t have the journal or article you need, request the article for free through Interlibrary Loan.

ERIC & Educational Resources

ERIC, sponsored by the US Department of Education, is the premier national database of education literature. ERIC covers educational research and literature from 1963 to present, as well as important practitioner materials and news sources.

Descriptors are disciplinary terms the ERIC database creators use to identify the major topics covered within a particular article, book or item. Descriptors can suggest other keywords you can use in your searching, or identify a more exact disciplinary term for the concepts you are seeking.

Create complex searches by combining multiple keywords.  Once you decide on your keywords, you can combine them to create focused complex searches.

 

Field Searching:  Full ERIC records are made up of field of information -- the title of the item is listed in the Title field, the author’s name is listed in the Author field, etc.  You can use these fields when you search by focusing your search for a term to a particular informational field.  For instance, if you wanted articles by Benjamin Spock, you could search for Spock in AU Author field.  This will give you results where Spock is an author.