Update: March 25, 2025
Since our original post (February 25th, below), researchers across the field of education have learned that the Department of Education in the United States is planning to scale back content indexed in the ERIC database. Editors of some journals indexed in ERIC have received notifications that read in part:
The Department of Education is working with the Department of Government Efficiency to “reduce overall Federal spending” and “reallocate spending to promote efficiency” (EO 14222). As a result, ERIC will be significantly reducing the number of records we index going forward. We expect to be reducing the collection by approximately 45% starting April 24, 2025.
At this time, we believe that all records currently in ERIC will remain available. This means that if you ran a search in ERIC previously, those results should remain in the index. However, future issues of journals selected for deselection will not be included going forward. We have contacted ProQuest (the vendor we use for ERIC at the University of Toronto) about how/when these deselection changes will be reflected (via future ingests) on the ProQuest platform. We're still waiting on clarification.
There are some grassroots efforts underway in the US and in Canada to track these journals as well as the non-journal material indexed in ERIC. For example, librarians in both countries are collaborating on compiling a list of titles that are being deselected from ERIC. Here at OISE, we are working with colleagues in the Ontario Teacher Education Library Association (OTELA) to cross-check the November 2024 list of ERIC journals and determine where else they are indexed and accessible.
We will continue to track changes as they happen and provide updates and other options to support your research, teaching, and learning. Please get in touch at oise.library@utoronto.ca if you have any questions.
February 27, 2025
We are closely following developments with the Department of Education in the United States including reported cancellations of contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Researchers and students will know that the Education Resources Information Center (or ERIC) is funded and operates out of the Department of Education. As ERIC is a primary resource for Education research, and one of the world’s largest educational literature database of journal and non-journal documents. The publicly accessible version of the ERIC database (offered free for public use by the Institute of Education Sciences) is an important tool for practitioners, members of the public, and the broader community who do not have access to the licensed version of ERIC (via ProQuest) that we do at the University of Toronto. As of Wednesday, February 25th, 2025, the publicly accessible ERIC database is online and operational. We will continue to update our users should the situation change. We have also been following another IES research tool, What Works Clearinghouse, which is also used here by the OISE community.
The licensed version of ERIC that we subscribe to at the University of Toronto Libraries (via ProQuest) remains available for the U of T community. Similarly, the library’s current subscriptions to education databases, individual journals, and articles, remain unchanged.
For support with research resources, please contact a librarian. We are here to help.
- To read more about the history of ERIC, please see this slideshow on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine: 50 Years of ERIC.
- Listing of journals indexed in ERIC as of November 2024 (PDF file) has also been preserved in the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine.
- Resource from the University of Minnesota Libraries: Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition