Library Guides: Education (General), Curriculum, and Instruction: Finding Articles

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Due to recent defunding and staffing cuts at the U.S. Department of Education, significant changes are occurring with ERIC and other Education databases. Penn State librarians are monitoring the evolving situation and recommend that researchers use various search strategies to find desired materials. Please contact us if you want assistance in conducting a thorough search. We're happy to help you!

Education Research Index
Combines ProQuest's ERIC with ProQuest's Supplemental Education Index (see descriptions below). At present, it is the best tool for researchers who want to conveniently access both ERIC and ProQuest's Education databases.

LionSearch
An integrated search of books, e-books, research articles, newspaper articles, and other publications. Contains vast materials that are not covered by ERIC or ProQuest Education databases.
Google Scholar
Google's search engine for scholarly journals. A vital tool for exploring materials outside of the Penn State library system, using algorithms that are different from library databases.
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Once you set your institutional preferences, links to full-text, if available at Penn State, should appear.

Supplemental Education Index
A new database, created by ProQuest, which "actively covers 75% of the journal titles covered by ERIC at its peak with the intention of increasing coverage over time." It is most useful for researchers who need a tool that is similar to ERIC, without ERIC's recent (2025) reductions.

ERIC (ProQuest)
Contains materials indexed by the U.S. Department of Education, reflecting recent (2025) changes to ERIC's scope. It continues to be valuable for its coverage of non-journal items (grey literature) that aren't included in other tools. Unlike the USDE version (linked below), this ProQuest version links to Penn State's paid journal subscriptions, enabling you to read articles online.
ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the major database for education literature, sponsored by the U.S. Department. of Education. The same database content is available on many platforms.
ERIC (USDE)
Public version of ERIC from the U.S. Department of Education, reflecting recent (2025) changes to ERIC's scope. Does not provide full-text of most journal articles, but does offer full-text of other documents that are not in the ProQuest databases linked above.
ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the major database for education literature, sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Education.

To Expand Your Search

JSTOR
An archive of major scholarly journals, including Education. Unlike many library databases, JSTOR includes and searches full-text articles back to the 1800s. Thus it is helpful for finding resources on obscure and historical topics.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization that provides a trusted archive of important scholarly journals and a selection of scholarly books. Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. While indexing for JSTOR articles is covered in LionSearch, the full text of the articles is not searched in LionSearch. Search JSTOR itself to ensure detailed coverage of full texts.
PsycINFO (via ProQuest)
Helpful for behavioral and psychological topics, such as child development, learning disabilities, and school psychology.
PsycINFO provides access to international literature in psychology and related disciplines. Unrivaled in its depth of psychological coverage and respected worldwide for its high quality, the database is enriched with literature from an array of disciplines related to psychology such as psychiatry, education, business, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, law, linguistics, and social work. Nearly all records contain nonevaluative summaries, and all records from 1967 to the present are indexed using the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms.
Education - Oxford Bibliographies
Vetted lists of the seminal articles, books, and sites for more than 300 topics in Education. Helpful for ensuring that you have identified the most important literature for your subject.
"With Oxford Bibliographies in Education, students and scholars now have a reliable, selective, and authoritative guide to the best literature in the field."
Childhood Studies - Oxford Bibliographies
Vetted lists of the seminal articles, books, and sites for more than 200 topics in Childhood Studies, including child development and adjacent topics. Helpful for ensuring that you have identified the most important literature for your subject.
"Childhood Studies is international and cross-cultural in scope, transcending narrow geographical confines and analyzing modern and historical childhoods both locally and globally. A great deal of this work has moved online with the most recent scholarship, research, and statistics appearing in online databases. With advances in online searching and database technologies, researchers and practitioners can easily access library catalogs, bibliographic indexes, and other lists that show thousands of resources that might also be useful to them."
DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals
Finds articles that are freely available on the Internet, many of which do not appear in library databases.
Search journal articles at the 'one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals'.

Other Subject Guides

Other Education Subject Guides
A list of more specialized Education library guides.