Guides: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Find journal articles in databases

Search databases

Scopus This link opens in a new window
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The largest multidisciplinary abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, books, journals, online tools, bibliographic databases and newsletters relevant to science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities. Provides tools to track, analyse and visualise research.

Databases offer various options to refine and structure your search. Use the LIMIT to search ABSTRACT for the most relevant articles. All databases, including Google Scholar, have article linking buttons to get to the complete article. However, it is not always possible to get the complete article instantly - authors don't give permission, UniSC does not have the journal etc

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Multidisciplinary collection of full text and citation index databases including scholarly journals, books, book series, reports and conferences. Provides Citation Indexes such as Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Chemical Indexes.
For effective searching use “quotation marks” around each search term, including single words.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Search tool for full text and citations of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories and universities.

Instructions: To get full-text articles, set your Google Scholar preferences.

Ingenta Connect
A multidisciplinary index with good coverage in the social sciences and humanities. Does not offer citation searching or article linking.

Good databases for education

ACM Digital Library This link opens in a new window
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ACM = Association for Computing Machinery, but in here find a wealth of thought about online learning for novices and experts.

You can search Google Scholar for articles on your topic. However, there are some databases which will give you fewer, but quality, results.

Taylor and Francis Online This link opens in a new window
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Most of the major higher education journals are in this database.

AND, OR, NOT, NEAR

When you search databases or the internet you are searching for WORDS not ideas.

Recreate your hypothesis into a series of keywords.

Databases, including internet search engines like Google, operate with protocols.

" " - parentheses are used for a phrase

"sunshine coast"
"random breath testing"
"george bush"

AND - for a more specific search join multiple terms with AND

roads AND wildlife AND "sunshine coast"

OR - broadens your search when:

your topic has alternative terms - "elementary school" OR "primary school"
there are different spellings - foetus OR fetus
the plurals may be different words - cow OR cattle ...OR bovine
you have options to cover - Queensland OR Victoria OR Tasmania

NOT excludes results, but should be used with care, best after an initial search has identified a group of ireelevant results

lions NOT football

NEAR, WITHIN, W/N Some databases give other options, such as NEAR or within.

NEAR finds a term close to another, while WITHIN specifies how close:

roads within 5 wildlife will find

"making roads safe for wildlife", "wildlife safety on roads", "safer roads for wildlife crossing"

NEAR or WITHIN searches are more flexible than phrase searches and return more relevant results than AND searches