ERIC
General Information:
ERIC, the Educational Resource Information Center database, contains records on more than a million education-related items. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, it provides electronic access to journal and non-journal education literature, from 1966-present.
Currently ERIC has new resources being provided as they are developed. UCF subscribes to ERIC through two database vendors: EBSCOhost and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA). ERIC is also available as a public website (http://www.eric.ed.gov) for free. The free version offers the convenience of searching without logging in, but it does not provide the Get Full Text link to the full text of articles if available. It may link you to a publisher that requires a fee for an article or you can follow the links to Find in a Library if available, however you will still need to login via EZproxy. The advantage to using ERIC via UCF and EZProxy is the ability to link to the full text of journal articles when available via the Get Full Text function at no cost. Interlibrary loan is another free option for the full text of an article through the UCF Library.
Search Tips:
We recommend using ERIC via EBSCOhost through your activated library ID number and EZProxy, or a direct Pegasus connection.
Advanced Search – this is the default screen
- Type in your search terms, using AND, OR, NOT from the drop-down menu to combine search terms
- If you know a specific field you wish to search, you can choose the search field from the optional
Select a Field drop-down list. Otherwise, you should use the default fields, which include all authors, all subjects, all keywords, all title info and all abstracts.
- You can place a number of limits on your search by selecting the options provided under “Limit your results”. When you place a limit on your search you will not see any records that do not match your limits.
- Other UCF databases may provide access to the full-text of the articles which are not available in full-text in ERIC, therefore, it is
NOT a good idea to limit your search to Full Text. If full-text is not available, clicking on the
Get Full Text button will identify other UCF databases that may provide access to the full-text of the article.
- Click on Add row to add up to 12 rows if you need to add additional search terms. To delete a row, click the
Remove Row link.
Visual Search – click the link Visual Search beneath the basic or advanced search box to have your search results presented in an interactive, visual map
- Type in your search terms in the search box
- Your results will come in a visual map organized by topics.
- Click on the topics to see subtopics. All of the results for each topic, subtopic, etc. are shown at the bottom of the column.
- Click on a rectangle to bring up a Summary of a record which will appear on the right hand side of the screen
- Click on the More link at the bottom of the abstract to see full text (if available).
Using the Thesaurus – click the Thesaurus button that is in the top part of the screen to increase your success in getting records that contain related concepts
- Type in your search term into the box and then click on the Browse button. The default setting is to search for
Terms Begin With. You can also select Term Contains or Relevancy Ranked.
- Click on the terms to find broader, narrower or related terms.
Result List
- When you conduct a Basic or Advanced search, the Result List Screen has three columns –
Narrow your results, All Results, and Limit your results.
- You can narrow your results by clicking on a subject term in the box on the
left hand column.
- The Preferences link below the search boxes will provide you with control over the look of your search result list and the
print, email, save features selection.
- You can print, save or email an article and/or citation.
Always use the internal print, email and save buttons; DO NOT use your browser's print function (i.e., do not go to file > print at the top of your screen). You can print, email or save each article separately, or you can add articles to an electronic folder and print, email or save everything at once.
For More Help:
There is a Help link in the upper-right corner of every page with general searching information. Each tab also has a question mark link right beside the search box with more specific information.
