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Universiteitsbibliotheek – LibGuides

Child Development: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (course 201800002): Step 2: A database for every discipline

General Search Engines

General search engines are a great starting point for a search, because they cover every subject. They do have some disadvantages:

  • They offer a very broad coverage, but miss out on articles in smaller niche journals.
  • They do not offer support for discipline specific terminology, for instance through keywords and a thesaurus.

The four major general search engines are:

  • Google Scholar (access / more info)
    Be aware that it actually searches the text of billions of articles and therefore always returns thousands of hits. Getting the results you need at the top of that list requires very specific keywords.
  • Web of Science (access / more info)
  • Scopus (access / more info)
  • WorldCat (access / more info)

Psychology

APA PsycInfo (access / more info)

  • Offers designated index terms and keywords to perform a very focused search.
  • You can limit your results to for instance age groups.

Education

ERIC (access)

  • Offers designated index terms and keywords to perform a very focused search.
  • You can limit your results to for instance educational levels (preschool, kindergarten etc.).

Sociology

Sociological Abstracts (access)

  • Offers designated index terms and keywords to perform a very focused search.

Philosophy

PhilPapers (access)

  • Important note: use & to combine search terms.
    Children divorce will return all publications on either children or divorce. Children & divorce will only return publications on children in relation to divorce.

Linguistics

Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) (access)

  • Offers designated index terms and keywords to perform a very focused search.

Medicine

PubMed (incl.UBU Link) (access / more info)

  • Offers designated index terms and keywords to perform a very focused search.

Law

Rechtsorde.nl (access)

  • Mainly for information in Dutch context. Also includes legislation and case law.

Reports and statistics

Overton (access)

  • Overton is a search engine that helps to find millions of policy documents from all countries and in all languages by subject, title, organization and more. The full texts are also searchable.

OECD iLibrary (access)

  • Online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, containing reports and statistics on education, social issues and many other themes in an international context.

Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (access)

Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (access)

  • Including Statline (access) for statistics

Even more databases

Check the list of all search engines available at Utrecht University, arranged by discipline.