ERIC - Education Resources Information Centre

OK, so here is the database for finding all those bibliographic references (over 1.3 million in fact) for education literature, as well as a growing collection of full text articles. This database covers:

• journal articles

• books

• research syntheses

• conference papers

• technical reports

• policy papers

• other education-related materials

From the “Search Eric” tab your options are: Basic, Advanced or Search the thesaurus. On the right of the search screen is a “Search Tips” box that provides useful help. The Basic search allows you to enter a search term or terms and choose keyword, tile, author, descriptor (subject from the thesaurus) or ERIC number, from a dropdown menu.

The Advanced search option provides more control over the search strategy, for example:

• Full text

• ED/EJ (ERIC document or ERIC journal)

• Peer reviewed

• Publication date (pre 1966 – 2011)

• Publication type

• Education level

One particularly good feature of this database is the “thesaurus” – very useful and you can search it alphabetically or by category. Using the category option you can drill down through subject topic menus to get the broad, narrow, related, and used for terms as well as a scope note. If you choose the alphabetical option you also drill down through the topics. With that description you are sure to find the exact aspect of a subject you are looking for. One thing to note is that the “Thesaurus” does use American spellings such as “catalog”. More records are added monthly to ERIC. PDF of full-text articles can be downloaded. When you have found something of interest you can place it on your “Clipboard”. From the clipboard you can print, email, export citations or save to “My ERIC” for future use. You can search for specific journal titles under “Our Collection” and then “Journal List”.

As a test for New Zealand content, a search for “New Zealand flax” brought up one hit, “Maori chief” found four. ERIC indexes the New Zealand Journal of Adult Learning and New Zealand Journal of Geography. So why not try this database all you students, teachers, tutors and researchers out there.

Vanessa