Early Childhood Education

The fastest way to determine if a database is to see if it is recommended by the librarian in your subject area! However you may soon discover that you need to branch out from the main subject area in which you are doing research. In that case you will want to use the Subjects dropdown () on the Find Databases page to find other recommended databases in other subject areas. 

All databases in our Find Databases page also have a short description that can help you determine if the database will be useful to you. 

For projects in Education we recommend the following starting points:

The following journals are a sample of the early childhood education journals we have available at our library. You can search for additional journals in Brandeis OneSearch. A few recommended searches are: Early Childhood Education -- Periodicals, Preschool -- Periodicals, and Child Development -- Periodicals.

When searching in a library database or library catalog, it's helpful to identify key concepts or search terms. The following search strategies can be used in our library catalog, Library OneSearch and in most of our library databases.

AND, OR, NOT:

• Use AND to narrow your search. For example, using charter schools AND Massachusetts will find articles with all terms, giving you more specific results.
• Use OR to broaden your results, such as using "individualized education program" OR IEP will find articles with either term, giving you more results.
• Use NOT to filter out results with terms you don't need. This technique has mixed results, so use it with caution.

Phrase Searching: Put quotation marks (" ") around search terms to search for them as a phrase. For example: "early childhood education".

Truncation (*): The asterisk (*) replaces any number of characters and will find all forms of a word root. For example, educat* will find educate, educator, education, educating, etc.

Grouping Keywords: Use parentheses ( ) around your search terms to group them together. For example, the search ("lesson plans" OR activities) AND kindergarten will return results that reference either lesson plans or activities for kindergarten.