Guides & Bibliographies

ERIC Guide

Introduction

The ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) database is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, and it provides extensive access to educational-related literature. Updated monthly, ERIC contains over a million research citations and thousands of FULL-TEXT ONLINE articles and documents. Many of the files are in the PDF format and require the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the articles.

ERIC is available to current UT Arlington faculty & students at this webaddress:

eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-ericCSA.cgi

Searching

A truncation symbol in ERIC is an ASTERISK (*), and when this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command "chican*" will have the computer search engine look for all possible endings of this word. It should find, "chicano," "chicana," "chicanos," and "chicanas."

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(chican* OR latino* OR latina* OR hispanic*) AND (imMiGra* OR migra*)

The first part of this statement will find material about the Latino population. The second part will look for the words "immigra" or "migration". The AND then links the first search statement with the second. This should be an effective way to look for information about hispanic immigration.

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Last Modified: 2008 February 13.
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