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QSTA 401 - Developmental Reading

ERIC: Education Resources Information Center

ERIC is the leading database to find articles on an education topic.  It will lead you to peer-reviewed journal articles, books, lesson plans, and other documents.  

You can search by:

  • keyword (free text)
  • title word
  • subject term (descriptor)
  • publication type

Descriptor searching is the most focused.  You can look for descriptors in the ERIC thesaurus.  The idea is to refer to a concept with the same term every time, so that you can retrieve everything about your topic, without having to grapple with synonyms.

You can limit your ERIC search to peer-reviewed articles, by checking a box.

Finding the Full Text

With some journals, ERIC (EBSCO) will have a link directly to a pdf of the article.  For other articles, a FInd It button will open a new window and run a search of all our databases for your article.  If this still does not work, please ask a librarian to help you track it down.

What Is Peer Review?

Scholarly vs. Popular Periodicals  

Rating
A short, informative video (just over 3 minutes) from the Vanderbilt University Libraries that will give you some things to look for when trying to identify scholarly periodicals.