Researchers deal with bibliographic research on a daily basis and are experts in retrieving the information they need. Yet, there exist many literature services and they sometimes are not explicit about their scope of publications. Educational research often calls for a transdisciplinary and transnational state of knowledge, which is distributed - and occasionally hidden - in several databases. To avoid getting lost in searching but instead successfully navigate   the ocean of information, a combination of knowledge about various databases, retrieval methods and search strategies is needed. As there is no one-stop solution in information seeking, the choice of databases, search engines and academic social networks remains an individual and research-related decision.

In a first step, the workshop aims to provide an overview of existing literature services, taking into account the publishing culture in educational science and concentrating on specialized databases in the field. Pros and cons will be considered with regard to the coverage of different media types and ways of access as well as their (sub)disciplinary focus. In addition, we will transgress the field of textual publications and give a short introduction to finding research data.

In a second step, we would like to address the participants and share their experiences of bibliographical work in the different fields of educational research as well as national contexts. Raising the question of the importance of publishing in national languages - regarding nationally organized educational systems - we shall discuss how this is reflected in search approaches, giving researchers the opportunity to express their needs.     

The final part takes different search strategies in selected databases as starting point for some practical exercises in order to experience which methods and query strategies lead to different retrieval results. Opportunity is given to reflect and discuss on practical issues.  

Objectives of the workshop are:

• To raise the participants’ awareness for different paths and methods in bibliographic search, to outline advantages and disadvantages of selected literature services as well as search strategies.
• To discuss experiences and needs.
• Practical experience of search strategies.

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