Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, ERIC is the major source for Education research materials. ERIC offers 1.3 million bibliographic records to journal articles and other education-related materials, with hundreds of new records added each week. While ERIC is freely searchable via the Internet, the ULS version of ERIC also provides links to all the online journal material at the University of Pittsburgh.
You can access ERIC through the library's database link below. We have three different access options for the ERIC database. All three contain the same information.
ERIC contains peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed material. It contains many reports, curriculum guides, conference papers and other types of grey literature. This material is useful but it is not usually data-driven research. Data-driven research is most often found in peer-review journals.
EJ (ERIC Journal)
Some items you find in ERIC will have an accession number that starts with an EJ followed by a six-digit number. These are journal articles citations from the Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE), which covers published journal literature from over 775 periodicals. Most of these will not be full-text in ERIC, only indexed.
To find the full-text of EJs, click on the link underneath the result that says Check Article Availability. This searches across our databases to see if the full-text can be located online. If it is unsuccessful, you will need to search PittCat by the journal title to see if we have print access.
ED (ERIC Document)
Some items you find in PittCat and in ERIC will be something called EDs. These are from the U.S. Department of Education Resources in Education file, which covers the document literature, consisting of research reports, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, and books (everything but journals).
EDs from 1993 to the present are accessible through the database and all older EDs are on microform on the ground floor of Hillman. In ERIC, use the 6 digit accession number and add the prefix ED (Example: ED374356) found at the end of the call number in the PittCat record (Example: ED 1.310/2: 374356) and search using the Accession Number field.
Create complex searches by combining multiple keywords. Once you decide on your keywords, you can combine them to create focused complex searches.
Field Searching: Full ERIC records are made up of fields of information -- the title of the item is listed in the Title field, the author’s name is listed in the Author field, etc. You can use these fields when you search by focusing your search for a term on a particular field. For instance, if you wanted articles by Benjamin Spock, you could search for Spock in AU Author field. This will give you results where Spock is an author.