Educational Studies

Top education databases

A library database provides access to the full text contents of thousands of scholarly journals. Articles published in scholarly journals are highly focused and written by researchers for other researchers and experts in the field. They either report on primary research they have done themselves or provide a review and evaluation of the body of work done in a given area.

Pro tip: It's good research strategy to do your searches in MORE THAN ONE database.

Below are the research databases we recommend for finding education related articles:

• Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window 

  Large, multidisciplinary article database that is a good starting point for research in many areas. 

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• Education Database This link opens in a new window 

  Articles on education across all levels of education, including early childhood education, primary and secondary education, and higher education.

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• ERIC This link opens in a new window 

  Scholarly and popular journal articles and reports from all areas of education.

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• CBCA Complete This link opens in a new window 

  Multidisciplinary scholarly and popular articles from Canadian journals and magazines.

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• PsycINFO This link opens in a new window 

  Scholarly articles from all psychological fields. Also searches book and thesis content.

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• PsychiatryOnline This link opens in a new window 

  Online access to the DSM 5 and other reference works and journals in psychiatry.

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What is a database?

A library database provides access to the full text contents of thousands of scholarly journals, sometimes covering a particular discipline or sometimes multi-disciplinary in scope, meaning they may cover many subject areas.

Databases come with tools that help you refine your search to get more relevant results, as well as links to related articles. In most cases, you can be confident that the articles you find will be credible sources to incorporate into your writing.

Key features of most databases:

• ability to filter results by date
• ability to filter results by content or publication type, ie, journal article, book, reference
• ability to narrow results by subject or discipline
• links to related articles
• links to articles that "cite" the one in your result list

Add Google Scholar to your set of research tools

Google Scholar is a search engine that covers much of the scholarly, peer reviewed literature from academic publishers, plus conferences, theses and dissertations, abstracts and more. Some of the content is available full text, and some will be citation-only. 

You can configure your settings to include links to articles available from Kwantlen Polytechnic Library subscription journals to avoid hitting publishers' paywalls. See the screenshot below.

Need an article/journal that isn't in our collection? 

If you are looking for a particular article in that journal, you can place an interlibrary loan. The Library can usually email it to you within 2-3 days.