JCKL Library Blog

Librarians will often tell students, especially graduate students, to use more than one database when working on a comprehensive literature review. EBSCO’s Education Research Complete includes 473 active full-text journals not available in any version of EBSCO’s Academic Search Complete. It can be used as another important resource in conjunction with ERIC, the US Department of Education’s database we have previously covered in this blog. These two subject-specific education-related databases will have a lot of overlap, but they both have some unique content and different features that students and educators can explore. If you are already familiar with searching Academic Search Complete or other EBSCO databases, consider using Education Research Complete as its specific scope will help narrow your results and produce more relevant results.

For researchers interested in education outside the United States, Education Research Complete is especially strong. Additionally, this database has more than 4,400 full-text education-related conference papers. Google Scholar is great, but nothing beats the way databases organize their content around a strong “controlled vocabulary,” meaning someone actually reads the article before it enters the database and assigns subject terms from a limited vocabulary list so that you find the content you are actually looking for!

Education is always evolving, and Education Research Complete will help you build awareness about the academic conversations happening in the world today.