By Jenaya Webb and Desmond Wong

Update: July 14, 2025

Since our previous post on March 25th (below), there have been some important updates on the status of the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) database.

Earlier this year, the US Department of Education’s Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) announced that there would be a 45% reduction in journals indexed in ERIC. However, a comparison of the list of journals posted on the ERIC website in November 2024, with the list of journals posted at the end of June 2025 shows closer to a 5% cut in journals being indexed in ERIC.

During this time of uncertainty at the US Department of Education and with the ERIC database, one of our large library database vendors, ProQuest (part of Clarivate), has committed to indexing the majority of the journals that make up the 5% cut. ProQuest has compiled a supplemental index, which works alongside ERIC in the ProQuest interface in Education Research Index (ERI). ProQuest has committed to maintaining this indexing service indefinitely. Their supplemental index is available to all users affiliated with an institution that currently has or has previously subscribed to any ProQuest product or database. Currently, there is no open public access to the supplemental index. For more information about ProQuest’s commitment to ERIC, please see their FAQ. Our colleagues at ProQuest have also compiled an easily searchable spreadsheet that compares journal titles on the ERIC 2024 and 2025 journal lists mentioned above.

IMPORTANT NOTE: ProQuest’s supplemental index only includes journals that have been cut from ERIC. The question of how and whether grey literature continues to be indexed in ERIC remains unanswered and pressing.

OISE Library users searching ERIC content have several options:

The public ERIC interface, which continues to be operated by IES and remains online (minus the cancelled journals);
The ProQuest interface for ERIC will continue to provide the content available in the public interface, as it has always done for the University of Toronto community (minus the cancelled journals); and
ProQuest’s new Education Research Index (ERI) which includes ERIC and the supplemental index of cancelled journals and makes them searchable at the same time. Please note that there are fewer search filters with this option, namely, users cannot search via “Education Level” and “Target Audience”. This is only available when searching in ERIC alone.

As we continue to follow the status of the ERIC database, it is important to note that ERIC is not only an important research database and public repository, it is also a vital indexing tool that contributes to the indexing of education materials in Google Scholar. These changes in ERIC will have an impact on how Education materials are represented in Google Scholar.

If you are a faculty member or student would like clarification or support on how this might impact your research practices, please feel free to reach out to the OISE Library. We will continue to update this post with new information as it becomes available.

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.

Reading

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.

Listing of journals indexed in ERIC as of June 2025 (PDF file).

Resource from the University of Minnesota Libraries: Finding Government Information during the 2025 Administration Transition