The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Search Tips

When you're searching for information related to teaching and learning, a simple trick can enable you to search multiple EBSCOhost databases at once, thereby maximizing your time spent searching. 

The simplest way to do this is to start at one of the EBSCO databases, such as Education Research Complete. Just above the search box, click the database name (highlighted below): 

From the list, choose the names of the databases you want to search. For the scholarship of teaching and learning, choose good options include Education Research Complete, ERIC, Teacher Reference Center, and APA PsycINFO, but there may be others that are helpful, depending on your topic.  

Now, you'll be able to search all of these databases at the same time, with any duplicates automatically filtered out of your search results. 

Once you've found one article that interests you, an easy way to find similar articles is to check out who has cited the original article. Google Scholar makes it really easy to find these other articles. 

Start at the Google Scholar homepage (scholar.google.com) and enter the name of the article in quotation marks (see below). 

From the results list, you should see the article you're looking for. To see which other articles have cited it since its publication, click on "Cited by ---" (highlighted below). 

Now you have a new results list of articles related to the original article. 

In addition to searching an entire database, you can also limit your search to a particular journal. To do this in any of the EBSCOhost databases listed under the "Resources" tab, simply enter your search terms in as many search boxes as necessary, and then add the name of the journal to the next search box. Putting quotation marks around the journal title will ensure that the database looks for those exact terms. Then, in the drop-down box, choose "SO Source" (see image below). 

Now you'll be searching only in that particular journal. 

When you're searching in education-related databases, you'll quickly find that these databases cover education at all levels, not just higher education. If you're interested only in higher education research, you'll want to make sure you add search terms that help limit your search to higher education. Adding (higher education OR college OR university OR postsecondary) to a search box will help filter out any sources that are not related to college and university education. Using the drop-down to the right of the search field to limit the search to the abstract only will help to ensure that an item focuses on higher education and isn't coming up in your search results because the terms are mentioned casually elsewhere in the article.