EDUC 167: Educational Psychology: Home

Many of the databases include both scholarly sources and non-scholarly sources (such as news articles). To limit your search to scholarly articles, use the menu options to the side of your search results.

To limit your search to more up-to-date research, use the database menu options to limit your search by date range.

Spend some time brainstorming keywords and search terms. Use subject headings or descriptors to help generate search terms.

When you find a good article, look at its References or Works Cited list. That will often lead you to other useful sources.

How do scholarly journals differ from popular (non-scholarly) publications? Check out this chart for the basic differences.

Google Scholar is a great tool for doing a broad search of scholarly literature on your topic:

• Google Scholar searches across many disciplines. 
• Your search results will include a broad range of sources, including journal articles, conference papers, theses, dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, and abstracts. 
• Results come from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. 
• Google Scholar also includes court opinions and patents.

You'll just want to keep some things in mind:

• Coverage is not comprehensive. Many sources are hidden in publishers' databases and journals that Google can't search, so you'll want to look at the library's article databases as well. 
• Search results can include links to things like course syllabi and high school term papers, so you'll want to evaluate what you find. 

You can access advanced search features by clicking the arrow in the right of the search box. These features allow you to refine your search.

Look for the words Get Full Txt @ Holy Cross next to an article. You should be able to access any of these articles through the library's subscriptions. If you come across a source that Holy Cross does not have access to, remember that you can request the item through Interlibrary Loan.

Scholar Settings When you are on the Holy Cross campus, Google Scholar will automatically show you those Get Full Txt @ Holy Cross links next to articles that Holy Cross has access to. If you are off-campus, you can set your Scholar Settings to show the links for accessing sources through Holy Cross. You can modify your settings by selecting the Settings link in the upper-right corner of Google Scholar webpage and then selecting Library Links. You can also modify the Scholar Settings to allow you to export sources into RefWorks by selecting RefWorks from the drop-down menu under Bibliography Manager.

Click on the Cited by and Related articles links at the bottom of a search result to find more relevant articles and books.