Searching the Canadian Universities database - FAQ
What information is stored in the database?
Our database provides information about programs offered by our member universities that generally lead to a degree, certificate or diploma. It will tell you about the level of the program, its language of instruction and other basic information. To get further details, each program record has a link to a relevant university website. The database does not generally provide information about courses offered within a program.
How often do you collect and update the information?
The program information is collected and updated by our staff and staff at member universities. We send out a request once a year to verify program information, primarily to registrar’s offices and schools of graduate studies. Most universities update their information each year, but it does occasionally happen that a university chooses not to review the information. We make sure, however, that if a university skips an update cycle, the information gets updated the next cycle. In addition to our main update cycle, we do smaller updates throughout the year. If you want to let us know about new programs or corrections to existing records, just send us an e-mail at publications@aucc.ca.
How are programs classified by field of study?
Each program gets classified by our staff on the basis of the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP). It was developed in 1980 by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the US. Statistics Canada worked with NCES on the 2000 edition of CIP and subsequently developed CIP Canada 2000, a Canadian version of this 6-digit classification. The CIP main areas of study are sorted alphabetically in the dropdown menu. Below the main headers (2-digit level), you will find the more narrowly defined field of study codes (6-digit level). Selecting a main header in your search will automatically return return all field of study codes in that group. E.g. selecting Biological and Biomedical Sciences (26), will return all programs coded from 260101 ( Biology/Biological Sciences, General) to 269999 (Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Other).
What is the best way to search for programs?
You can do searches by selecting from the menus, searches by keyword and searches that are a combination of those two. If you click on the “+” symbol, you be able to search the sub disciplines within the main group.
Since classification systems like CIP have inherent limitations, a keyword search might sometimes be more useful. Semiotics, for example, does not exist within CIP and the easiest way to find programs in that area is through a word search, which is a full-text search of the program names. You can search on parts of words (e.g. semio, semi) or whole words (e.g. semiotics). Phrases are possible too, but since the database searches for an exact match to your search string, it will not pick up phrases that are only slightly different.
The word search function is very basic and is not equipped to do Boolean searches. You can use the word search in combination with the dropdown menus. In our semiotics example above, selecting Quebec in the province dropdown, would limit the search results to Quebec universities.