Library Guides: Educational Leadership, Policy, and Principalship: Finding Articles

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Due to recent defunding and staffing cuts at the U.S. Department of Education, significant changes are occurring with ERIC and other Education databases. Penn State librarians are monitoring the evolving situation and recommend that researchers use various search strategies to find desired materials. Please contact us if you want assistance in conducting a thorough search. We're happy to help you!

ProQuest Education Database
ProQuest's largest database for Education journal articles. Provides full-text for many publications. Recommended for most research projects.

ProQuest Education Journals provides access to over 785 journals, more than 615 in full text, including all aspects of education, with coverage since 1991.
ERIC (ProQuest)
Contains materials indexed by the U.S. Department of Education, reflecting recent (2025) changes to ERIC's scope. It continues to be valuable for its thesaurus and for its coverage of non-journal items (grey literature) that aren't included in other tools. Unlike the USDE version (linked below), this ProQuest version links to Penn State's paid journal subscriptions, enabling you to read articles online.

ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the major database for education literature, sponsored by the U.S. Department. of Education. The same database content is available on many platforms.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
Articles from a political science/public policy point of view.

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts is building on the merged backfiles of Political Science Abstracts, published by IFI / Plenum, 1975-2000, and ABC POL SCI, published by ABC-CLIO, 1984-2000. The database provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration / policy. The serials list of the new database is actively under construction, with a focus on expanding international coverage. As of February 2004 approximately 1,432 titles are being monitored for coverage; this list will continue to grow.
Google Scholar
Google's search engine for scholarly journals. A vital tool for exploring materials outside of the Penn State library system, using algorithms that are different from library databases.

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Once you set your institutional preferences, links to full-text, if available at Penn State, should appear.

To Expand Your Search

LionSearch
An integrated search of books, e-books, research articles, newspaper articles, and other publications. Contains vast materials that are not covered by ERIC or ProQuest Education Database.
Business Source Premier
Helpful for principalship topics, such as budgeting, human resources, and management/supervision.

An essential article database for business research providing the full text for more than 2,000 periodicals, including about 1,000 scholarly journals. Covers virtually all disciplines in business and economics, including: accounting, economics, econometrics, finance, marketing, management, MIS, QMM and supply chain management.
ERIC (USDE)
Public version of ERIC from the U.S. Department of Education, reflecting recent (2025) changes to ERIC's scope. Does not provide full-text of most journal articles, but does offer full-text of other documents that are not in the ProQuest databases.

ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the major database for education literature, sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Education.

Education Research Index
Combines ProQuest's ERIC with ProQuest's Supplemental Education Index (see description below).
Supplemental Education Index
A new database, created by ProQuest, which "actively covers 75% of the journal titles covered by ERIC at its peak with the intention of increasing coverage over time." It is most useful for researchers who need a tool that is similar to ERIC, without ERIC's recent (2025) reductions.

Education - Oxford Bibliographies
Vetted lists of the seminal articles, books, and sites for more than 200 topics in Education. Helpful for ensuring that you have identified the most important literature for your subject.

"With Oxford Bibliographies in Education, students and scholars now have a reliable, selective, and authoritative guide to the best literature in the field."

Other Research Guides

Social Science and Law Subject Guides
Links to further resources for law, public policy, sociology, and related areas.