LibGuides: Education Resources: Grad Student Orientation 2023

Databases and tools for Master's level research

Library research at the graduate level will be more complex than at the undergraduate level.

Graduate students will likely want to access dissertations as they provide in-depth information and literature reviews on specific topics. Brandon University subscribes to:

ProQuest Dissertation and Theses Global
The world's most comprehensive curated collection of multi-disciplinary dissertations and theses from around the world, offering nearly 5 million citations and 2.6 million full-text works from thousands of universities.
BU One Stop Search
Search "Brandon University Education Master" for BU thesis before 2017

BU Library Guide: Institutional Repository at Brandon University (IRBU)
"IRBU is Brandon University’s Institutional Repository. Its mandate is to store, preserve, make visible and openly available digital assets of the University, which include, but are not limited to scholarly, educational and institutional outputs of the University, as well as selected archival collections."

To find information on Education related topics search the following databases:

ERIC
Education specific topics.
ERIC (EbscoHOST)
ERIC, the Education Resource Information Center, provides access to education literature and resources. - Coverage: 1966 -
JSTOR Journals Collection
You can limit to Education and/or Psychology Journals
PsycARTICLES This link opens in a new window
Contains more than 153,000 articles from nearly 80 journals published by the American Psychological Association (APA), its imprint the Educational Publishing Foundation (EPF), and from allied organizations including the Canadian Psychological Association and the Hogrefe Publishing Group.
PsycINFO (EbscoHOST)
The PsycINFO®, database, American Psychological Association’s (APA) renowned resource for abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. - Coverage: 1900 -
BU One Stop Search
Search the library catalog for books, journals, and online links
Google Scholar
Tries to provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.
Web of Science
A true citation index: Your single destination to the world’s largest collection of research data, books, journals, proceedings, publications and patents. Covers all subject areas.
Ulrichsweb
This database is important for evaluating journals - especially for determining if a journal follows a peer review process prior to publishing articles.
WorldCat (through FirstSearch)
This database is important for discovering publications that exist on a particular topic. If we do not have access to some of them, they may be available to you through our Inter-library loan service.

Use of a bibliographic manager, (also called a citation manager) is recommended at the graduate level.

Brandon University subscribes to:

Refworks
RefWorks is a bibliographic manager subscription that the BU Library has purchased. All current Brandon University students, faculty, and staff can create an account in RefWorks with their BU email address.

There are many other bibliographic managers available.

Here is a link to a comparison of some of the popular ones

Comparison between citation managers
From the University Library at University of Illinois Chicago, this chart compares Refworks, Legacy Refworks, EndNote, and Zotero
Choosing the Right Citation Tool
This article gives description and comparison of four citation managers: EndNote, Mendeley, RefWorks, Zotero