Scientific Literature

Literature Ecosystem Explorer: Scale vs. Quality

Education Literature & Discovery Ecosystem

Trade-off between Total Coverage (Scale) and Metadata Rigor (Curation)

A "library database" applies to many forms of databases, indexes, or repositories:

Library Catalogs index all books owned or subscribed to by a library or multiple libraries.
Citation and Subject Indexes, which summarizes and assigns subjects/index terms to documents. Many of them include citations and abstracts, link the relevant citations to the full text of articles, or enable the linking to the full text. Several have a built-in Thesaurus.
Online Collections of e-journals and e-books, either grouped by the publisher or collected and re-sold in subject-themed packages by "content aggregators" such as EBSCOhost or ProQuest/
Discovery Systems or services (KSU SuperSearch) attempt (with varying success) to retrieve information from multiple databases via a single search engine.
Open access databases and academic search engines

GIL-Express Guide This link opens in a new window
Reviews the main page, advanced search, search results, and browsing features.

Please click on green [] shapes to access different types of databases

Heck, T., Keller, C., & Rittberger, M. (2024). Coverage and similarity of bibliographic databases to find most relevant literature for systematic reviews in education. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 25(2), 365-376.

Phase of the searching, objectives, and the scope of sources	Searching Technique	Databases
"Conceptual Search" Conceptual paper, conceptual framework via literature review; the topic is disciplinary, and various types of literature should be included	Thesaurus Searching or Concept Searching	Indexes: ERIC Education Source PsychInfo SocIndex
"Citation Analysis and Literature Mapping" Tracking the progression of the idea, identifying relevant or connected works and landmark studies (the citation counts) in multiple disciplines	Citation chaining, cited reference search, forward and backward citation search, Pearl growing	Web of Science Scopus Google Scholar IEEE Explore BioOne Academic Source Complete (EbscoHost) ResearchRabbit or LitMap
Preliminary Search Scanning for any type of material that discusses a new idea, emergent concept, intervention, and so on. Brainstorming on the topic.	Keyword and Natural language or semantic search	SuperSearch Advanced Google Scholar ProQuest Research EBSCOHost Academic Complete Semantic & AI-driven search engines (SemanticScholar, Dimensions, Consensus, and others)
Systematic Search