Education Research Guide

To find journal articles, choose an education database from the library website, or search in one of the following databases:

What Does "Peer Reviewed" or "Refereed" Mean?

Peer review is a process that journals use to ensure that the articles they publish represent the best scholarship currently available. When an article is submitted to a peer reviewed journal, the editors send it out to other scholars in the same field (the author's peers, sometimes called "referees") to get their opinion on the quality of the scholarship, its relevance to the field, its appropriateness for the journal, etc.


Publications that don't use peer review (e.g., Time, Newsweek, Psychology Today) rely only on the judgement of the editors about whether an article is interesting enough to get people's attention.  While their articles can be exciting and even informative, you can't rely on those magazines to provide you with accurate, up-to-date scholarship.

When searching ERIC, remember that there are different types of results that you can get: documents and journals.

• ERIC documents (ED) are non-journal items, such as research reports, conference papers, lesson plans, course syllabi, and other materials of interest to educators. These documents are usually not published elsewhere and are often submitted by the teacher that created them. Most documents from 1993 to the present are available full text online. Older documents are available on microfiche.
• ERIC journals (EJ) are journal articles that are important to the field of education. These articles have been published in over 800 professional journals. Many articles are available full text online through ERIC or through another database.