Q. How do I find articles about doctoral persistence in business students?

On the library databases page, select the Education Subject Databases. “Doctoral persistence” is related to continuing education in graduate programs which these databases will have information on.

To get to the Education Subject Based Databases:

1. Start on the Jerry Falwell Library main page here.
2. To the right, under Databases by Subject select Education.

Two suggested databases from the Education database list are Education Source Ultimate and Education Database (ProQuest). It is recommended to search in multiple databases as each database subscribes to different journals and searching in multiple locations will provide more results. 

In the search bars provided, (click on Advance Search in ProQuest to get to the multiple search fields) you will want to enter in your desired search terms. Because the literature uses various terms to describe persistence, you will want to combine multiple terms using the Boolean phrase ‘OR’. Using OR will expand the database search for articles including those words. 

            For example:

            1st search field: doctoral OR phd OR grad* OR student*

            2nd search field: persistence OR retention OR graduation

The asterisks (*) are known as truncation and they are used to search multiple word endings and spellings. So instead of searching just “student” adding the * searches for “student” and “students”. 

If you want your search to focus on business students, then in the search bar you would need to add quotation marks around the phrase like so: “business student*"

If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to us at (434) 582-2220 or at research@liberty.edu.