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ERIC (EBSCOhost): Search Strategy

A guide to effectively using ERIC to search for education related articles, including strategies, finding full text, emailing or printing articles, exporting to RefWorks, and more.

Where should I start?

The Advanced Search page is a great place to start because:

  • It can do more than one type of search at a time
  • It has several limiting features which help make searches more effective

What are the best search strategies to use?

 

Using the following "smart searching" techniques will greatly facilitate your searching:

• Narrow the search by using AND

Example:  autism and early intervention

Result: By using AND, you are telling the database to only show results that contain both "Autism" and "Early Intervention"

• Broaden the search by using OR

Example:  autism and early intervention or preschool

Result: By using OR, you are telling the database to show results that use the term "early intervention" or the term "preschool"

• Broaden the search by using an asterisk to search for different word endings

Example:  teach*

Result: This search will find any word beginning with "teach" including teacher, teachers, teaching.