EDUCATION DATABASES:

OVERVIEW, PART 2

Professional Development Collection -- EBSCOHost

Professional Development Collection (PDC)

• It has over 520 education specific journals

• Over 350 of these are peer-reviewed• Many of the journals are available in full

text as far back as 1965 for some titles.• Searchable by topic or by journal title.• Full text articles can be emailed or

printed.

Getting to PDC:• Use the same path as for ProQuest,

but from the list of databases under Education, select Professional Development Collection.

• Then you will need to authenticate.

The default search screen is a keyword search.

As with our previous example with ProQuest, you get a lot of hits, but they may not all be relevant.

To do a subject search, click onSubjects from the top

toolbar.

Type in the term:

Select the term that best matches your needed term.

You can view any of the options. Probably it is best to look first at Academic Journal References.

Again, when searching by subject (Note the DE before the term) the results go down substantially, but you also are left with relevant citations!

Any that are available full text will be clearly marked.

You can continue searching using otherterms and Boolean searching.

Let’s say you wanted only articles relevant to primary education and reading comprehension

Repeat the process with the new search term.

Click on Search History to view previous searches in the current session.

1. Leave the last search in the first row box; 2. Check mark the first search results; 3. Click Search with AND.

Your Boolean search results in these citations.

Finding journals in your virtual IWU library

Journal Search Engine

In the list of results for our last search in PDC, one showed that it was available locally. How can you get this article?

Use the journal search engine for titles at IWU. The link takes you right to it.

The link takes you right to the needed journal availability. You can either request it from OCLS (from the paper subscription) or click on PsycARTICLES and go to the full text online.

Find the needed year (2006) and then locate the right issue (Aug or 3); then the needed article.

Locate the article and click on the link to view the article.

This works well for EBSCO databases, but what about other databases you may be searching? For example, you may need this article that you found in Academic Onefile. You need the full text….

Start at the OCLS Homepage

• Click on: Journal Titles

• You may need to authenticate with last name and 14-digit library access number.

In the FIND box, enter the name of a journal (not the article title).

The resulting list tells where/how/what dates this title is available from IWU

The most important information is not where itcomes from but the dates available full text.

Note that it says it is available in Academic Onefile, but it has a 1 year embargo. This means the most recent 1 year is not available from this database.

If your needed article falls within the embargoed 1 year, thenyou can request the article from OCLS as it is available in a papersubscription from IWU Library.

However, if the title was available online, we could simply follow the “path” selecting the year, then the issue then the article.

Click on the full text link (either one will work) to view/print/email the full text.

For PDF files, always use the toolbarfor Adobe Acrobat Reader for printing.

Let’s summarize:

• Introduced to EBSCOHost’s Professional Development Collection and began some basic searching

• Learned how to find a journal title and subsequently an article using the IWU Journal Search Engine.

Next, we will look at ERIC. It is considered the premier education database, simply because it is the biggest and goes back historically

the farthest.

It allows for more in depth searching using the “subject

searching.”

If you are an online MEd student, then proceed now to the ERIC tutorials.