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The University of Massachusetts Amherst

EDUC 229 International Education

Why Databases?

Databases are collections of information. We purchase access to several databases that contain journals and magazines where you can find articles for your research.


There are two types of databases for articles:

Subject-specific: These databases gather articles from journals about specific disciplines or topics, such as Education or Psychology.

  • Good for: Finding scholarly articles on very specific topics

Multidisciplinary: These databases gather articles from across multiple disciplines. It could be a database that covers a wide variety of social sciences or it could be a database that covers a wide variety across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences. Using a subject-specific database often means you can search for very specific topics and find materials.

  • Good for: Finding scholarly articles on your topic from a variety of perspectives from different disciplines

Peer Reviewed/Refereed/Scholarly Articles

Articles that are peer-reviewed can also be referred to as  peer-reviewed, refereed or scholarly articles.

Scholarly articles are written by researchers or experts in a field to share the results of their original research or analysis with other researchers, experts and students. These articles go through a process known as "peer review" where the article is reviewed by a group of experts in the field and revised based on peer feedback before being accepted and published by a journal.

This short video further explains what peer review is and why it's important.

Best Databases for Starting Education Research

These databases are good subject-specific databases for education research:

These are multidisciplinary databases that also have education research. Social Science Premium Collection covers multiple disciplines in the social sciences and Scopus has coverage in the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences. With Scopus, you can sort by citation to see highly cited articles.