The ERIC Database & MINITEX Service

ERIC - the Education Resources Information Center - is an online digital library of education research and information. ERIC is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education.

ERIC is located at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ or just Google “ERIC.” Type in your search terms using standard Boolean logic. You may sort your results by Date, Title, Author, etc. The default setting is for most-recent first. Be aware of the dates; some information might be too old for your purposes. A few results will have the full-text articles attached to them but most will require you to find the article in a professional journal or other publication. Let’s see what a typical result looks like. This search was for “gambling + secondary schools.” You’ll see all the bibliographic information you need as well as an Abstract so you can decide if the full-text would be relevant for you. We will be requesting full-text articles from Minitex so you’ll also see the “EJ” or “ED” number needed for this service.

Minitex is a document retrieval service located at the University of Minnesota’s Andersen Library. Your Librarian has retrieval privileges with Minitex and is happy to provide this service to you. The documents are emailed to her in PDF format and she will then forward them to your teacher. Your teacher can either print them out for you or email them to you and you can print them out or read them as attachments. Any document with an EJ number is usually easily retrieved from Minitex. If you want an “ED” document, check the number of pages before requesting this. Some ED’s are actually books and we can’t get those for you. You may request these from a college if you have borrowing privileges there. Here’s the data your Librarian needs in order to request a document from Minitex. Name of Journal (Source) Title and Author Volume and Number, Date, Page(s) EJ or ED number ! Here’s what the online request form at Minitex looks like.

The documents from Minitex are in PDF format. You may disregard the first couple of pages; these are just information from Minitex. Your article will begin following the first pages. As you can see, these are photocopies from the actual journals.

Your Library at MHS is a great source for help with your research. After you graduate, your local Public Library or your College or University Library will be happy to provide you with the same great service. Make use of them!