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Educational Leadership and Administration Research Guide

Library resources for students in Educational Leadership

Best Bets - Educational Leadership

Best Databases for Researching Educational Leadership & Administration Topics

While your specific topic will help you determine your choices of databases to search, the following databases should cover a range of essential topics in the scholarly literature relevant to school principals, superintendents, and other administrative and leadership roles.

Note: For legal research related to education, see the More Databases for Education box, Laws & Court Cases tab.

More Databases for Education Research

Scholarly Peer Review

Why Does My Professor Require Peer Reviewed Sources?

Peer review is the rigorous process scholarly resources go through to become published. Most often when we talk about peer review, we are talking about journal articles going through the process, but some books do also. Peer review typically involves review boards of experts in a topic or discipline who read and evaluate submitted articles/materials to determine if they meet the standards for publication. This review involves more than just looking at the article's format, rather also examining thoroughness of the literature review, soundness of methodology, accuracy of results, and logic behind conclusions that are drawn. Often articles are returned to the authors for revisions before final publication.  

  • For a clever video explanation of peer review, see NC State University Library's Peer Review in 3 Minutes (video)
  • Remember that when using many library article databases, during your search you can limit your results to only Peer reviewed (Scholarly) articles by simply checking a box.

screenshot showing checkbox to indicate scholarly (peer reviewed) articles in a search