April 14, 2025

ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) – a key indexing database for education and the social sciences – will see a significant reduction in its content effective April 24, 2025, according to communication from the ERIC help desk sent to researchers inquiring about the impact of federal cuts on the database. In addition to peer-reviewed journals, ERIC contains key documents and reports from think tanks and state departments of education, as well as selected books and dissertations.

According to the ERIC Help Desk: 

“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, the number of records added to the ERIC collection will be significantly reduced going forward. The number of actively cataloged sources will be reduced by approximately 45% starting April 24, 2025. Subject matter was not considered during the process to identify which sources would be made inactive. Please note that all records currently in ERIC will remain available. There has been a delay in notifying publishers impacted by this content reduction due to the government reduction in force. Once publishers have been notified, a final list of retained sources (journals and non-journals) will be posted. We will provide more information about this list as soon as possible.” 

What does this mean? 

• After April 24, 2025, the number of journals indexed in ERIC will be reduced by 45%, and you will see less research and fewer results going forward.  

• All records currently in ERIC are expected to remain available. This means that if you ran a search in ERIC previously, those results should remain. Articles from future issues of removed journals will be missing after April 24, 2025. 

• ERIC (ProQuest) and ERIC (EBSCO) should also retain all current records, and we anticipate that newly created records will continue to be ingested into these platforms.  

• At this time, we don't have a complete list of journals being removed from ERIC. We also don't know if other types of publications will be removed from ERIC in the future. 

Additional Coverage of Journals in ERIC 

There’s no direct replacement for ERIC indexing. However, some of the journals indexed in ERIC are also indexed in other databases, such as Education Source and Teacher Reference Center. See a list of Drexel-subscribed databases that either focus on or include education coverage. Librarians are happy to consult on search strategies to maximize finding literature related to your topic of interest.

Email librarians@drexel.libanswers.com for assistance.  

Journals Removed From ERIC 

No official list has been announced yet, and volunteers are compiling a list of journals being removed from ERIC. Journal editors can also submit their journal for inclusion on this list.   

We will continue to monitor the situation and will provide updates on our websites as they become available. Please contact librarians@drexel.libanswers.com with questions.