Using Education Research Complete

Basic Search

ERC has the option for either basic or advanced search. Basic search allows you to use the same search options as advanced, but with only one search bar. This is a great option for a simple search with only one or two search terms. 

Advanced Search

The advanced search function allows you to use multiple search bars, field searching, and automatic Boolean operators. This is a good option for more complex research, or research combining multiple ideas. 

Search Options

Both basic and advanced search on ERC give you search options that you can apply before you search. If you're looking for only very recent research, you can limit by the published date. You can also check off "Full Text" to eliminate any results that don't have the full text of the article, or check off "Peer Reviewed" to only get results from peer reviewed publications. You can also limit by language and publication type. 

These search options can help to make your results more relevant right from the start. 

Field Searching

When doing an advanced search, you have the option to search by specific fields using the dropdown box to the right of the search bars. This will limit the search to only the specified field. Some examples are author, title, abstract, and subject terms. 

This is especially helpful when you have a specific article in mind and you know the title or author. Or if you want to find all of the articles written by a certain author. 

For example, if you want to find all of the articles Carol Dweck has written on psychology, you could do an author search for Dweck, Carol, and a subject search for psychology. 

Filters

Once you've completed a search, you can now use the filters on the left hand side of the screen to further narrow your results. Some of these filters are the same as the search option on the search page, so if you forget to narrow by peer reviewed before you search, you can still do it afterwards. You can also refine the publication dates, language, geography, and source type. 

One of the most useful filters is the "Subject" filter, which can help you narrow down your results even further. Using this filter, you can see at a glance what subjects are covered in your search results, and filter out irrelevant ones. In this example, the search was for "early" AND "literacy". That search returned over 11,000 results. The Subject filter could allow the searcher to narrow down the results to ones related to "writing" rather than "health literacy". It can also be useful for filtering by the type of research conducted, such as questionnaires or interviews. 

Thesaurus

The Thesaurus tool is used to find the most common search terms that are indexed in the database. If you are not getting relevant results, or not getting very many results at all, your search terms might need to be reexamined. 

You can access the thesaurus along the top banner of ERC. 

Say you are wanting to do research on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. If you do a search for "ADD", you're not going to get many relevant results, both because that is no longer the accepted term, and also because the database will search for the word "add", so you'll get a lot of results about addition. If you go into the thesaurus, you'll see that instead of ADD, you should search for "attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder". You can click directly on the term from the thesaurus to do a search for that prefered term. 

If you are doing a search that may encompass multiple terms, you can also use the thesaurus to combine terms together. For example, the thesaurus lists many different types of literacy. You could combine a few terms from the thesaurus list by checking off the box next to them and add them to your search by clicking "add". 

Lesson Plans

Education Research Complete allows you to search for lesson plans! Simply search for PZ "lesson plan" AND the subject of your choice. 

For example, search for "PZ "lesson plan" AND fractions" to find lessons plans relating to fractions!