The default option on British Education Index is the Basic search screen – use this if you want to do a quick search for a simple topic such as phonics or school leadership.

Write your search terms (keywords) into the search box to find relevant references, which will then appear in a list with each reference showing the title, author(s), publication details (e.g. journal name and date), start of the abstract (summary) and subjects. Click on the title of a reference to see more details and read the full abstract. Select Full Text Finder to link to the full text if it is available from the library. This may be from the publisher’s webpage or via a link to ‘LibKey Instant PDF’.

Use the Advanced search screen to do a more detailed search – there is a link above the search box for this. This option enables you to add and combine search terms more easily using the 3 search boxes, with the option to add more boxes if you want to. Put one concept into each box, for example if you were researching the use of play in learning maths in the early years, you could enter early years in the first box, play in the second and mathematics in the third.

If there are different words you could use for the same concept, these can be entered into the box with OR between them, for instance maths OR mathematics OR math. Doing this means that BEI will find articles and papers which use any of those words, which is much quicker than doing separate searches for each one.

You can also scroll down this Advanced Search page and add filters, including Limit your results to Full Text; or by Publication Date; or by Publication Type (e.g. Academic Journal); or by Educational Level or Age Group. Then click on Search to see your results. By default these are ranked by relevance, but you can change to list by Date newest or Date oldest.

After searching you can use options under the search box to further filter your search results.

When you click on a reference you will see icons at the top of the page to Save, Share, Cite or Download. You can export references (e.g. to Refworks) by selecting Cite, then Export Citation.

See the video at the end of this page for a demonstration of how to use Advanced Search on an EBSCO database.

Database Guide - British Education Index