Higher Education & Student Personnel: Finding Articles

When searching in the databases for articles the following tips may help you.

* - This is the truncation symbol, it searches for variations of your term. For example: administrat* will return: administration, administrator, administrators, administrating.

AND - Use the word AND when you want to combine search terms (this will reduce the number of items found). For example: higher education AND diversity will find articles that discuss higher education and diversity.

OR - Use the word OR when you are searching for a topic that may have different names (this will expand the number of items found). For example: higher education OR college OR university will find articles with any of these words.

NOT - Use the word NOT when you want to exclude certain terms from your results. For example: qualitative NOT mixed methods will find articles that talk about qualitative research but exclude any that are mixed methods.

There are over 100 databases available to you as a KSU student. Below are some databases that contain information on higher education topics. If you are accessing the databases from off-campus you will be asked to log in to the KSU Proxy with your Flashline credentials, click here for more information. The databases listed below are my recommendations, you can always visit the complete listing of library databases.

Business Source Complete: While this database is used primarily by business students and faculty it does contain articles about the financial and management aspects of higher education. 

Education Fulltext (1983-Current): Education Full Text indexes articles from education journals. This resource is helpful in locating articles on a wide range of educational topics. There are approximately 770 journals indexed, 440 of them are peer-reviewed. This database uses an OSearch interface.

Education Research Complete: Education Research Complete is a great tool for locating professional and scholarly research on a variety of educational topics. The database provides indexing and abstracts for more than 1,500 journals, as well as full text for more than 750 journals. This database uses an EBSCO interface.

ERIC (1966-Current): ERIC is a useful database for finding educational information from lots of different sources (journals, magazines, books, conferences, and governmental agencies). It contains resources dating back to 1966 and is helpful when conducting historical research in education.

Professional Development Collection: The Professional Development Collection is a wonderful database to use when looking for those “how-to” articles written by practitioners.

Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection: The Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection covers more than 510 full text titles covering topics such as emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry & psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational and experimental methods.

PsycINFO (1967-Current): Covers the literature of psychology and related disciplines from an extensive collection of journals, books, book chapters, and dissertations.