Library Guides: Higher Education: 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.
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.
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.

To Expand Your Search

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 - 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."
EDUCAUSE Library
Focuses on information technology in higher education. In addition to journal articles, it includes blogs, reports, webinars, and other material.

Users must click on login in the upper right hand corner and create a profile account with their psu domain e-mail to gain access.The EDUCAUSE Library is an international repository for information concerning use and management of information technology (IT) in higher education. It aggregates over 24,000 resources submitted by EDUCAUSE, EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis Research (ECAR), EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), Higher Education Information Security Council (HEISC).

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.

Access World News: College/University Newspapers
More than 500 college and university newspapers, including various titles from Pennsylvania.

This subset of Access World News is a collection of over 580 college/university newspapers with articles related to issues and events, topics and trends at universities across the country.
DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals
Finds articles that are freely available on the Internet, many of which do not appear in library databases.

Search journal articles at the 'one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals'.