Research Guides: Educational Psychology: Getting Started

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This guide is designed for new researchers to find articles, sources and get started with research in topics related to counseling and student personnel psychology, psychological foundations of education, school psychology, and special education.

Start with:

Education Source
Search full-text education journals covering all levels of education--from early childhood to higher education--as well as all educational specialties, such as multilingual education, health education and testing.
ERIC Education (Ebscohost)
ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is a database of full-text education literature and resources. With coverage dating back to 1966, it is essential for education researchers of all kinds.
APA PsycInfo
Find articles in thousands of psychology journals, from 1806 to current. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.

Then try any of the following:

Academic Search Premier
A great place to start your research on any topic, search multidisciplinary, scholarly research articles. This database provides access to scholarly and peer reviewed journals, popular magazines and other resources. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.
Education Index Retrospective
Indexes nearly 600 education journals as far back as 1929. Includes book reviews.
Ovid MEDLINE
Searches MEDLINE, which is the primary source of journal articles for the health sciences (fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, public health, health care systems, and basic sciences). Ovid MEDLINE is optimized for advanced literature searches. Coverage is from the 1940s to the present.

Systematic reviews

A systematic review is a research method in which a team formulates a research question, searches, selects, and appraises the literature in order for researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers to make evidence based decisions.

The key characteristics of a systematic review are:

a clearly stated set of objectives with an explicit, reproducible methodology;
a systematic search that attempts to identify all studies that would meet the eligibility criteria;
an assessment of the validity of the findings of the included studies, for example through the assessment of risk bias; and
a systematic presentation, and synthesis, of the characteristics and findings of the included studies.

Systematic reviews are reproducible, transparent, and the methods used are documented. A systematic review answers specific questions which are fully described in the protocol. Bias is minimized by having at least two people on the team do each step. A systematic review may take a year or more to complete.

Librarians are expert searchers who can support and guide investigators throughout the systematic review process.

Also check out:

Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Search journals in linguistics and language sciences from 1973 to the present including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics in journal articles, book reviews, books, book chapters, dissertations and working papers.
Communication and Mass Media Complete
Search for journal articles on topics such as communication, mass media, film, television, marketing, business communication, health communication, and more.
PubMed
Searches MEDLINE, which is the primary source of journal articles for the health sciences (fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, public health, health care systems, and basic sciences). Coverage is from the 1940s to the present. View this tutorial to learn how to go from a general idea to a very precise set of results of journal articles and scholarly materials.