Higher Education

This guide shows how to find journal articles, books, and other materials in the field of higher education.

Questions? Ask a librarian!

Find Journal Articles

Education Source

Education Source provides full text, scholarly articles as well as reports, magazines, and a few books. It covers all levels of education and includes specialized topics such as multicultural education.  

Search Education Source in EBSCOhost

ERIC

Educational Resources Information Center (also available at https://eric.ed.gov/) is a database of journal articles and other documents such as conference papers, research center reports, whitepapers, and more. Recent documents are available online as well as many journal articles. The education-specific focus of the database provides relevant results.  Search ERIC in EBSCOhost

Academic Search Ultimate

Academic Search Ultimate is a large database with articles from scholarly journals, popular magazines, newspapers, trade periodicals, and more. Many of the articles are available to read online. Searches usually obtain more results, but require more narrowing for relevancy and scholarly quality. Search Academic Search Ultimate in EBSCOhost

For more suggested sources for journal articles, try the library's Social Sciences databases list

Find Books

WorldCat

WorldCat is a very large, global database of books, articles, dissertations, archive collections, and more. Remove the filter for Geneva College to see results from libraries near you. The best results will be for books and perhaps dissertations. ERIC and Academic Search Complete are better resources for finding journal articles.

Search for books all around the world

Recommended Reading

Books at McCartney Library about Higher Ed Topics

Based upon a project in mid-2000s to provide Geneva College faculty with professional development resources, the following lists are updated as new materials are purchased.  They are not exhaustive lists, rather they provide a sampling of some newer books about these relevant topics.

• Christianity and Higher Education
• Higher Education History
• Leadership and Administration
• Pedagogy
• Philosophy & Future of Higher Education

Statistics

U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics collects data about colleges and universities, which is compiled and searchable by institution or by specific factors (graduation rate, cost of attendance, ethnicity, Carnegie classification, and much more). Though data can be several years behind, it is chief authoritative source for statistics.

Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

Research Tips

Advanced Search

Most library search tools include Advanced Search sections that allow you to limit, focus, and revise your searches. Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT can combine words and phrases to give you more precise results.

• AND: Christianity and professors
• OR: colleges or universities
• NOT: retention NOT memory
• "" quotes: "first year"
• * asterisk: educat*
• () parentheses: orientation AND (freshmen OR "first year")

Additional search options such as publication date or scholarly articles will also help narrow your results. Article databases may have a limit for "scholarly journals," "academic journals" or "peer reviewed." They don't read every article, they just look at the journal as a whole, so some items marked "Academic Journal" are an editorial at the beginning or book reviews. In WorldCat, there is no limit for scholarly books, but adding the keyword "bibliographical references" will limit your search to those books that include citations.

Interlibrary Loan

Don't limit yourself to what is online. Interlibrary Loan is free and easy.  If you know exactly what you want, fill out the Interlibrary Loan form. When you are searching in EBSCOhost article databases look for a link saying Request this item through interlibrary loan and all the citation information is copied to a request so all you need to do is enter your name, ID, and email address. 

Articles are usually emailed and arrive quickly, sometimes within two days. Books requested through interlibrary loan are delivered to Geneva College through the US Postal Service. Books must be picked up at McCartney Library. If you are studying in a distance program, a large, public library near you may have it or will obtain it through interlibrary loan service. We will make every attempt to provide you with items that you can't obtain otherwise!

Email pgcloan@geneva.edu with questions about interlibrary loan or the status of your request.

Finding a particular article

If you have a citation to an article, you can find out whether it is available online or in print at McCartney Library. Search or browse the title list of McCartney Library's print and online journals, magazines, and newspapers, and see if that year is available.

Citation Saving Tools

• Most library search interfaces allow creating a free account to save your search results for viewing later. 
• You can email individual articles or citations to yourself.
• The citations provided by databases frequently have errors. Check citations with help from online guides!
• Research organization tools are free and can be used online or downloaded to your computer. Zotero and Mendeley are two popular choices.

Need research advice? Ask a librarian!