Research Guides: TESOL & Second Language Education: Database & Journal Finder

Database Search Techniques

Why Use Databases?

Click on the video below to watch a tutorial on the differences between a subscription-based library database and a free search engine. It explains when and how to use each. (Access video by clicking the image).

Google Scholar is a special case, a search engine that actually allows you connect to with the library databases. This is great for doing a quick, general search for articles on your topic. For more refined searches, please use the databases listed below on this page. The video below explains how to connect your Google Scholar account to your UMD Libraries account:

For more information on how to do more effective searches, please refer to the tabs above:

How to Search
Finding Background Information
Develop a Search Strategy
Searching Tips

Watch these short video tutorials to learn how to search the databases.

EBSCO:

ProQuest:

You can also search multiple databases at once!

EBSCOhost and ProQuest are platforms that house approximately 60 to 75 databases. In order to get the best search results you should select the databases you need (i.e. if your subject is "education" you would limit your search to education databases) . To do this go to the top of the database homepage and look for the terms All databases, Change databases, or Choose databases. See examples and video tutorial below.

For ProQuest:

For EBSCOhost:

What if there is no full text?

Don't panic! You have several options:

1st Option:
Use journal finder to search for the journal.
2nd Option: Request article from another library
This tutorial will assist you in using Inter Library Loan to request the article.

Finding Background Information

Start your research by exploring the following resources:


UMD Discover	Ultimate Search Complete

G oogle Scholar	UMD Libraries Databases

Tips for Organizing Your Research

Visit our Research Commons' Site for creative and practical suggestions.

Searching Strategies

Choosing your search topic can be a difficult process - it is important to pick a topic that is not so narrow that little if anything has been written about it, yet it is also important to pick a topic that is not so broad that there is too much information and it is impossible to develop a coherent and focused thesis.

Let's say that ....

Steps:

1. Divide your research question into concepts and connect them with the Boolean operator AND.

smoking AND youth

2. Brainstorm some synonyms and connect them with the Boolean operator OR:

smoking OR tobacco OR “pipe smoking”, etc.
Specific communities? (ex. minority, African-American, immigrants, low-income, children, etc.)
Look up ‘smoking’ in MeSH.

3. Your final search strategy could look like:

smoking AND (youth OR teens OR teenagers) AND minority NOT Canada

A brief video tutorial on how Boolean operators work.

Searching techniques to limit or expand your results

Boolean search	AND OR NOT	Find all the words Find any of the words Find documents which have the first word, but not the second word	internet AND education internet OR intranet internet NOT html
Phrase search	"..."	Search for an exact phrase by using quotes around the phrase	"environmental health"
Truncation	*	Find all forms of a word - the asterisk *is used as a right-handed truncation character only.	Searching for econom* will find "economy", "economics", "economical", etc.
Wildcard	?	Replace any single character, either inside the word or the right end of the word. ? cannot be used to begin a word.	Searching for wom?n will find "woman" and "women."

Keywords/synonyms

It is important to realize that if you search a database with a certain word or phrase and you don't retrieve results to your liking, it doesn't mean that there are no other articles in that database on your topic. It may mean that you need to try other related words in your search, such as synonyms. For example, try automobile or auto instead of car.

Magazines & Newspapers	Written for a general audience Typically what you would see in a bookstore or on a magazine stand Intended to inform and/or entertain Popular journals do not undergo 'peer-review' process Can be found in many of the article databases to which the University of Maryland subscribes Examples: Time, Sports Illustrated, Scientific American, etc.
Scholarly Journals	Written by/for experts in a given field Usually these are available through academic libraries or anywhere there is a need for the highly specialized information contained within these publications Intended to inform Undergo 'peer-review' process prior to publication (see below) To focus on these resources when searching UM article databases, be sure to limit your search to 'scholarly' or 'peer-reviewed' literature Examples: American Journal of Public Health, Genetic Epidemiology,Family and Community Health, etc.
Books	Overview, broader in scope Can be out-of-date, so be sure to check the publication date
Open web	Large variety in terms of quality As opposed to subscription-based internet resources such as article databases and e-journals that the UMCP libraries subscribe to.

Criteria for evaluating resources:

Accuracy
- How does this resource match up with others you've seen?
- Do the results seem plausible?
Authority
- Who created it?
- What are the qualifications of the creator?
- Where is the information hosted? (see Web Domains below)
Content
- Is this written in a ‘professional’ manner?
- Is it sloppy?
- What kind of evidence does the creator use to support what they are saying?
Purpose
- Is this written in an objective, detached way?
- Is this someone’s personal opinion?
- Who is the intended audience?
Timeliness
- When was this produced?
- If a website, when was this updated last?
- How old are the works that are foot-noted/cited?

Some examples:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - a reliable source for information from
Pet Therapy - the author is unknown, not updated since 2007

Web Domains

Anyone can create a Web site. It is important to find out who is the author and what are the author's qualifications or expertise in order to determine the credibility and reliability of the information.

.com	Produced by a commercial enterprise, trying to sell something or funded by advertisers
.edu	From an educational institution (college, high school, museum)
.net	Network of computers
.mil	A military site
.gov	Produced by the government
.org	Produced by a nonprofit organization
.uk, .cn, .us, etc.	A country-sponsored site
.md.us	A web site from the state of Maryland

TESOL Databases and Journals

Database Finder and Journal Finder are your portals to research databases and electronic journals.

Databases are subscription resources that bring articles from a variety of magazines and/or journals into one place with a sophisticated search engine. Many of the databases allow you to read the entire article online. Consult Database Finder for the full list of available subject databases. Remember also that with EBSCOhost and ProQuest, you can choose from a list of databases and search all of them at once. Some databases focused on other social science subjects will still have information relevant to education, e.g. a criminal justice database may have valuable articles on the school-to-prison pipeline.

Citation Finder is an additional resource to help find specific articles.

The UM Libraries subscribe to over 300 databases!!! The ones listed here are the most useful education databases where you'll be able to find information on your topics. See the Supplemental Databases tab for a fuller list of related subject databases.

Academic Search Ultimate
Chicano Database
China Academic Journals (CAJ) Full-text Database
Education Index Retrospective
Education Source
ERIC
Ethnic NewsWatch
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
PAIS Index
Professional Development Collection The database provides a highly specialized collection of electronic information especially for professional educators. This collection offers information on everything from children's health and development to cutting-edge pedagogical theory and practice. This database contains author names with and without full first names. To find all authors with the last name 'Smith' and the first name 'Richard', you may want to search on 'Smith, Richard' OR 'Smith, R' in the Author field.
Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection
PsycINFO
Teacher's Reference Center

JSTOR

Database Finder and Journal Finder are your portals to research databases and electronic journals.

Citation Finder is an additional resource to help find specific articles.

The UMD Libraries subscribe to over 300 databases!!! The ones listed here are additional great resources.

Chronicle of Higher Education Description: Provides news, information, advice, and job listings for college and university faculty members and administrators.
CQ Researcher Full-text database that provides comprehensive analysis of each topic, including history and background information, relevant pro & con arguments, current status, bibliographies, contact information, and outlooks on upcoming "hot topics" in current events. Covers news topics in a wide range of subject fields, from social issues to the environment, health, education, politics, and science and technology. Online access to issues dating back to 1923
Criminal Justice Abstracts Criminal Justice Abstracts, formerly produced by Sage Publications, includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to criminal justice and criminology. The increasing globalization of criminology is reflected in Criminal Justice Abstracts' coverage of hundreds of journals from around the world. Do not attempt to search on authors by truncating the first name. Last, F? will often result in zero hits. Try searching on Last or Last, First
Data Planet Includes over 550 source databases from over 90 data providers in 16 subject categories ranging from Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement to Banking, Finance, and Insurance, as well as Education, Agriculture, Labor and Employment, Health and Vital Statistics, and Population and Income.
Dissertations & Theses Global This database is the an authoritative source for information about doctoral dissertations and master's theses. The database represents the work of authors from over 1,000 graduate schools and universities. Full text is available from 1997 to the present. It also contains a significant amount of new international dissertations and theses both in citations and in full text. It offers access to more than 90 percent of the doctoral dissertations accepted each year in North America. The database also covers thousands of dissertations and theses from around the globe. Time Span: 1861 to present.
Ethnic NewsWatch Full-text bilingual (English/Spanish) database of 200 publications of the ethnic, minority, and native press. 1990 to the present. Multidisciplinary - news, culture, and history.
Family & Society Studies Worldwide A primary family studies resource, Family & Society Studies Worldwide provides more than one million citations and abstracts to professional journals, books, book chapters, conference papers, theses & dissertations, websites & internet documents, selected popular literature, government reports, statistical documents, working papers, and unpublished material. This database is a compilation of 4 database files: Family & Society Studies; Australian Family & Society Abstracts; National Clearinghouse on Family Violence, Health Canada; and U.S. Military Family Resource Center Documents Database. Dates of coverage are 1970 to the present.
Family Studies Abstracts Family studies database comprised of 45,000 entries, covering such areas as marriage, divorce, and family therapy.
Gale Virtual Reference Library Gale Virtual Reference Library offers more than 85 reference sources including encyclopedias, almanacs, series, and more. Offering access to more than 300 encyclopedias and selected industry-standard reference series. Including content from SAGE Reference, John Wiley & Sons, Cambridge University Press, Berkshire Publishing Group, Cartographica, Linworth and Gale imprints.
GenderWatch Full text database comprised of 175 titles, primarily of the many ongoing periodicals that deal with gender issues, including academic and scholarly journals, regional publications, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, booklets and reports. Subject areas covered include: government, history and politics, lesbian and gay studies, women's studies, and other humanities and social sciences disciplines. Dates of coverage of some publications are 1970 to the present.
HathiTrust Digital Library NOTE: Download of full book PDF files may require login with University ID. A shared, growing digital repository of millions of books and periodical volumes scanned from major research libraries, including those digitized by institutional effort and by both Google and the Internet Archive. Offers full-text searching and advanced bibliographic search capabilities (such as author, title, publisher, language, etc.), and full PDF downloading of works in the public domain. One feature includes the ability to select and place items from the database into a tailor made collection that may be kept private to the user or shared publicly with others. Items that are saved to collections can be searched independently of the rest of the repository, allowing users to perform focused searches on subsets of HathiTrust materials.
National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstracts (EBSCO) Provides summaries of more than 190,000 resources in criminal justice, juvenile justice and substance abuse. Includes journal articles, government reports, books, research reports and unpublished research.
ProQuest Ebook Central Ebrary is a collection of thousands of online full text books and other materials in a variety of subject areas. In order to view, copy, or print you will need to install the ebrary Reader software. Links to download the reader are available from the main page after you connect. Truncation is not supported. Searches in ISSN, ISBN, and Year are done as Text searches. All searches report 'Hits were found' rather than the number of hits. Boolean NOT and OR searches are not supported.
Race Relations Abstracts Includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to race relations, including ethnic studies, discrimination, immigration studies, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline. Records are selected from many of the top titles within the discipline, including Race, Ethnicity & Education and Ethnic & Racial Studies. This resource does not contain ISBNs.
Sage Business Cases Digital collection of over 4,850 interdisciplinary business cases from over 120 countries. Includes subjects such as entrepreneurship, accounting, healthcare management, leadership, social enterprise, and more.
Sage Knowledge Includes an expansive range of SAGE eBook and eReference content, including scholarly monographs, reference works, handbooks, series, professional development titles.
Sage Reference Collection Online versions of published reference works from SAGE. A great place to begin your research.
Sage Research Methods Designed to teach research methods, design research projects, understand or identify new methods , conduct research, and write up findings. Includes collection of case studies, teaching datasets, and video to offer real world applications and hands-on practice for hundreds of qualitative and quantitate research methods.
Sage Skills: Business Covers over 850 topics across five modules: Data Analytics, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Organizational Communication, and Professionalism. Includes interactive self-assessments, virtual scenarios, downloadable data, and expert insights.
Sage Skills: Student Success Interactive digital resource featuring the work of a diverse set of academic experts to help undergraduates build confidence and gain essential skillsets for academic and personal success. Includes videos, self-assessment, audio summaries, and virtual scenarios.
Sage Video Streaming video content in such areas as Business and Management, Counseling and Psychotherapy, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Education, Media, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. All videos are fully citable with searchable transcripts, custom clip creation and embedding. Videos include Documentaries, Films, Case studies, Tutorials, Interviews, and more.
Urban Studies Abstracts Urban Studies Abstracts covers urban affairs, community development, urban history, and other areas of relevance to the discipline of urban studies. The index contains 40,000 records from a variety of key sources, with coverage back to 1973.
Women's Studies International Covers the core disciplines in Women’s Studies to the latest scholarship in feminist research. Supports curriculum development in the areas of sociology, history, political science & economy, public policy, international relations, arts & humanities, business and education. Includes journals, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, books, book chapters, proceedings, reports, theses, dissertations, NGO studies, Web sites & Web documents, and grey literature. Coverage: Covers issues in women's studies including feminist theory and history, family, mental & physical health, prejudice & gender discrimination, law & legislation, employment etc. Time Span:1972 to present; quarterly updates.

eBook Comprehensive Academic Collection (EBSCO) Search and view the whole text of eBooks chosen specifically for academic researchers.
EBSCO eClassics Collection Search and view the whole text of eBooks from a collection of classic literature.
OpenDissertations

Open Access Journals

In contrast to the databases and journals that the UMD libraries subscribe to, there are many academic journals who offer the full text of all or some articles for free. This pages has a few key open access journals in the field of Special Education. For a more comprehensive directory of open access journals visit the Directory of Open Access Journals, which provides free, full text and scholarly journals.

TESOL & Second Language Education

Subject Guide

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Database Search Techniques

TESOL Databases and Journals

Open Access Journals