Welcome to the British Education Index tutorial By the end of this tutorial you should be able to: Do an advanced search to find references Use search techniques to make your results more relevant Know what to do next to find full text , print or save your results Please note that this tutorial also applies to ERIC and Australian Education Index.

Go to the student home page and login with the student login ID and password NB: Staff would log in at Staff Homepage, and select Resources Online.

Select Resources Online from the list of applications

Select E-Resources Notice that E-Resources opens in a new window, leaving Resources Online open separately. This is important for later.

Select your subject (e.g. Education) and then select ‘Find Resources’

Now select British Education Index from the list NB: When staff click through to the Index, they will be asked for their Athens account details before entering the database.

You now need to choose the database you want to search, which in this case is British Education Index. To select it, simply click ‘Advanced Search’ to the left of the database. No need to tick the box first.

The Advanced Search screen includes a search history box, which you will use to build up your search strategy and combine searches. Below that, you have some date, language, publication and subject-specific limits which you can also combine with your keywords to produce a more relevant set of results.

Search strategy Before you start searching any database you should plan your search strategy in advance as it is a more efficient way of managing your time. Keywords Before you start searching, think about keywords for your given subject. If your topic is: Discuss the role of bullying policies in the secondary school. Your keywords would be: bullying policy secondary school Alternative keywords Authors use many different terms which mean the same thing. Remember, the computer will only search for what you tell it to search for. If there are other words that mean the same (or similar) things as your search terms you must search for these too. Our research topic is fairly straightforward, however other keywords you might use include: Anti-bullying Victimisation Policy, policies (different forms of the word) Finding keywords You may find it useful to do some preliminary reading in textbooks and encyclopaedias which will help you identify some keywords, and perhaps also key authors.

Type in your first keyword (bullying) and click ‘Search’. The search is added to the Search History table, as search number 1. The ‘Results’ column tells you how many references were found for that search.

Now type in your next keyword (policy) and click ‘Search’. Your second search is added to the Search History. Note that your search terms haven’t yet been combined.

If you wish, you can broaden your search for ‘policy’ to include ‘policy’ and ‘policies’. British Education Index uses the dollar sign ($) to truncate words. Type in ‘polic$’ and click ‘Search’. Notice that you now have a few more results.

Rather then type in ‘secondary’ to represent the educational level, we’ll apply a limit to capture all references relevant to the secondary school level. Scroll down to ‘Age and educational-level groupings’. Select ‘Secondary education’ and click ‘Search’. The search is added to the search history (search number 4).

The searches should be combined to produce a more relevant set of results. In the search field, type the numbers of the searches and combine them with ‘and’. Notice that we don’t need to include search number 2. In this example, we are combining ‘bullying’ AND ‘polic$’ and the educational level ‘secondary education’. Then click ‘Search’.

The new, combined search is added to your search history as search number 5. There are only 17 results but these should be highly relevant. Click ‘Show Titles’ to view the results.

The set of results may include Government reports and policies, conference papers and proceedings, as well as journal article references. Where full text is freely available online, a web link will be provided to access it. The web link - and other information including abstracts and descriptors of the main themes – can be viewed by clicking ‘Link to abstract/database record’ above the reference. Government report… Conference paper… Journal article…

Finding the full text British Education Index does not give you the full text of journal articles. You should check the library’s A-Z Journals List for a subscription to the journal you require. The journal may be available in print, online, or both.

To find the full text of a journal article, students and staff must check the A-Z Journals List to see if the library has a subscription to it. For example: the record below is for an article in School Leadership and Management. The year, volume, issue and page details are all available: 1998, 18, 1, pp

Leaving the British Education Index window open, click on the browser window containing Resources Online. Click A-Z Journals List. In the search box, type the journal title School Leadership and Management, and click ‘Search’. The results show you that we do subscribe to it, and what access options are available. If necessary, you can click on the British Education Index window to double- check the rest of the reference details. We need 1998: this should be available through Academic Search Premier, Ingenta or Swetswise. (It should also be available in Print, as a catalogue search will show.)

The easiest option would be to click through to Academic Search Premier to access the full article. Click the link in blue, then follow the year, volume, issue and page numbers to find the full text.

Broadening your search The term or will broaden a search and include items where the authors have used different terms. You can use or to combine your searches in the same way as we used and.

Go back to the British Education Index window. Click ‘Search page’ to return to your search history box. We’ll try a new search: special educational needs policies in the secondary school. You can search using phrases: search ‘special educational needs’. ADJ means that each word should be adjacent (next to) each other. SEN is a commonly-used acronym for ‘special educational needs’. Type ‘SEN’ into your search box and click ‘Search’ to get a set of results. You could then broaden your search to find references which refer to ‘special educational needs’ or ‘SEN’ (or both). Combine your searches with or, using the appropriate numbers. Your search history should look something like this:

Using the Advanced Search option gives you the flexibility to combine your searches in many different ways. The broad ‘special educational needs or SEN’ search can be combined with previous searches for ‘polic$’ and the educational level ‘secondary education’ to produce a new search which addresses the topic ‘SEN policies in the secondary school’. Run this search now. It should look something like this:

Saving your search strategy You can save your search strategy for future sessions. At the top of the search history screen, look for the blue button ‘Save search’. Click this button. In the next screen, choose your ‘Start’ search (1) and your ‘End’ search (9) using the radio buttons. All steps in-between will be included. Give your search a name (‘Policies’) before clicking ‘save search’.

When you next log in and access this database, you can click ‘saved searches’ and re-run the search strategy. This is useful for not only keeping track of your searches and results, but finding the latest results added to the database which are relevant to your search.

Printing your results You can print a screen of references. This may be useful where you need to check the A-Z Journals List for a series of articles, or where you need to retain for your own records. Click ‘search page’ to view your Search History. Click ‘show titles’ next to a search to view the results. In the example below, you can see the first few results of search 9. Click the ‘print screen’ button. Select your printer and print.

ing your results (1) You can send the results to a desired address. At the top of your search results screen, tick ‘Select All’ to select all results on that screen only. Alternatively, tick individual references, or just make a note of the total number of results you have, if you want to all results for your search (e.g. search 9 has 31 results). Scroll to the bottom of your results and click ‘ ’.

ing your results (2) 1. In the ‘ ’ screen, type your preferred address. 2. Give your a title (e.g. policies) 3. Scroll down to the ‘Format/Documents’ table. Enter the range of results you want to include in your . (e.g for all results for search number 9. This will already have data entered if you selected your references on the previous screen.) Also, select format ‘Short’. 4. Click ‘deliver’. Click ‘Yes’ to confirm. You have now sent the selected results by .

Congratulations – you’ve come to the end of this tutorial Sarah Oxford Academic Liaison Librarian for Institute of Education 16 th April 2009 Website for UW IoE students and staff: For Swetswise information: and