EDF 315: Education in a Diverse Society: Finding Articles

ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is a large database of education resources.

There are three main types of documents in ERIC:

• ERIC Journal Articles (EJ) are abstracts for journal articles from over 980 educational and education-related journals from 1966 onward.
• ERIC Documents (ED) are abstracts for unpublished documents, such as speeches, conference proceedings, teacher-made curriculum guides and much more. Many of these are now full-text online. Older ERIC documents are also available in microfiche by ED number on the second floor south of the Marx Library.
• ERIC Digests are:
• Short reports (1000-1500 words) on topics of prime current interest in education.
• Targeted specifically for teachers, administrators, policymakers, and other practitioners, but generally useful to the broad educational community.
• Designed to provide an overview of information on a given topic, plus references to items providing more detailed coverage.

ERIC Search Tips:

• ERIC uses a controlled vocabulary for its subject headings ("descriptors"), so check the online thesaurus to be sure you are using the correct ERIC term for your topic. For example, "multiculturalistm" is not a subject heading. Use "cultural pluralistm" instead. Use "academic achievement" for "academic success."
• Do not search more than one EBSCO database at the same time you are searching ERIC - the ERIC thesaurus is specific to this database.
• Scroll down the advanced search page to find other ways to limit and focus your searches, such as selecting only journal articles and/or reports - research to get research articles.
• Create a free MyEBSCOhost account to save preferences, organize your research with folders, and save and retrieve your search history.

This database contains scholarly research and information relating to all areas of education, from early childhood to higher education, as well as to administration, policy, funding, and related social issues. Education Research Complete contains abstracts for more than 1500 journals, and full text for more than 750 journals, 100 books, and numerouse conference papers.

Even though it looks like ERIC, this database uses different subject headings. For example, Education Research Complete uses the term absenteeism; in ERIC the thesaurus term is attendance. In Professional Development Collection, it is called school attendance.

The limits are also different. You can limit your search to academic journals, peer-reviewed, and articles only, but you may not get research articles. Does it say study or case study or experiment or control group or research method or something similar? That will tell you it is primary research.

To see if a particular journal is in the Libraries' collection, or to browse journal titles by discipline, use the Our Journal List link.