skip to content | Accessibility Information

Library video script: British Education Index: finding journal articles

  • To search for education-related resources, you can use a database for the British Education Index. For more information on how to access this database, please refer to the relevant tutorial.
  • From the first screen select the advanced search option. On the next screen you can enter your search terms. For example, if I wanted to search for publications on the subject of boys' performance in maths, I could enter the search terms maths and boys. This will search the database for publications containing both the keywords maths AND boys. Clicking on the search button will display a list of results of publications containing both of the keywords maths and boys. The total number of results for those search terms is also displayed; in this case, 31.
  • Using a search technique called truncation can further increase the number of search results. Truncating the word maths by adding a * symbol after the h (math*) will broaden the search terms to include maths, mathematics and mathematical. As you can see, the number of search results has increased to 90, and the search results now include mathematical and mathematics.
  • Using an alternative associated keyword in one of your search fields can further broaden the search. For example, searching for the truncated maths (math*) AND boys OR gender will search for results containing both keyword combinations maths AND boys; and maths AND gender. The result of broadening the search in this way is that the number of records found has again increased significantly; this time, to 244.
  • You can also select where you want to search for your keyword combinations using the drop-down menus next to each search field. Instead of searching the whole document, you could narrow the search to look for the occurrence of the keyword combinations in the document title only.
  • Towards the bottom of the screen, there are options that allow you to further narrow down your search, to include results containing only specific document types, languages, age groups and education levels.
  • From a list of search results, you can click on the link to access the full citation record for the selected article. To access the article, you can click on the Find it! logo. For more information on using Find It! please refer to the relevant tutorial.

^ Top of page