EDOL Ed.D. Organizational Leadership: Searching ERIC -Key ed. database

ERIC provides unlimited access to more than 1.3 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials, with hundreds of new records added multiple times per week. If available, links to full text are included.

Within the ERIC Collection, you will find records for:

• journal articles
• books
• research syntheses
• conference papers
• technical reports
• policy papers
• other education-related materials

In the ERIC database,

EJ indicates the item is a journal article.

ED indicates the item is an ERIC document:Which includes... research reports, conference papers, issue papers, monographs, and ERIC digests. ERIC indexes education-related materials from a variety of sources, including scholarly organizations, professional associations, research centers, policy organizations, university presses, the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies, and state and local agencies. Individual contributors submit conference papers, research papers, dissertations, and theses. 

From 1966-2004 many of these ED documents were made available on microfiche;  the a large portion of the microfiche set is available at the Pepperdine West L.A. campus and is available through Pepperdine Campus Loan (ask at the Research Help or Check Out desk). 

Parentheses also may be used to control a search query. Without parentheses, a search is executed from left to right. Words that you enclose in parentheses are searched first. Why is this important? Parentheses allow you to control and define the way the search will be executed. The left phrase in parentheses is searched first; then based upon those results the second phrase in parentheses is searched.

Generalized Search: kindergarten or elementary and reading

Focused Search: (kindergarten or elementary) and reading

In the Generalized Search example, the search will yield two types of results. First, results that contain the term "kindergarten". Second, results that contain the terms "elementary" and "reading".

In the Focused Search example, we have used the parentheses to control our query to only find articles that contain either the term "kindergarten" or "elementary" AND the term "reading".

Limiting a Search by Date of Publication

Using the date field (DT), you can narrow the search to a certain publication date. For example, type technology and DT 9601- to only produce results concerning technology published after January 1996. Note: If a hyphen ( - ) is used after the date, it will indicate that the search is open-ended.

You could also type: education and DT -9601 to retrieve articles containing the word "education" prior to January 1996.

Or type education and DT 9501-9512 to retrieve articles that contain the word "education" during 1995.

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Pepperdine Payson library under construction 1972.  Photo from: University Archives Photograph Collection [digital resource], Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives 

Pepperdine College Library at old Vermont Street location, 1949.  Photo from: University Archives Photograph Collection [digital resource], Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives