Education Research for Graduate Students

Keep track of the sources you use for your research so you can cite them in your paper and bibliography. It is very important to cite your sources to provide appropriate credit for the ideas of other researchers to avoid plagiarism. You will create a citation whenever you use the words (direct quote) or ideas (paraphrase) from another author. Failing to do so is a violation of the K-State Honor Code.

You will usually use APA format to cite the articles you find unless you have received different instructions from your professor (e.g. for historical research -- see the historical education research tab on the left side of this guide) or you are writing for a publication that requires a different format. One benefit of using a citation manager is that you can change citation formats easily.

Many databases have a "cite" link on the records that will help you create a citation in the appropriate format. This can be helpful, but you always need to check it. It does not work well for ERIC documents with ED numbers (see ERIC citations below).

You may also need to edit the DOI given by the "cite" feature.

Incorrect DOI format:  doi:http://dx.doi.org.er.lib.k-state.edu/10.26634/jet.17.4.17670 

Any time you see "er.lib.k-state.edu" in a DOI or other URL, remove it for your citation link. It is what tells the database to ask for your K-State eID login, and will not work for anyone outside of K-State

Correct DOI format for APA 7th edition: http://doi.org/10.26634/jet.17.4.17670 

APA 7th edition does not use "doi:" in front of the DOI link.

Citation Managers

I highly recommend using a bibliographic management tool. It will save you lots of time in writing your bibliographies, but be sure to proofread - it isn't perfect! Zotero is a good (free) citation management option.  Zotero has a quick start guide, and you can find many Zotero tutorials online. 

Find more citation tools on our Citations and Bibliographies research guide.

Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) is a good resource for more information about APA and other citation formats. The APA website provides lots of great tutorials. The APA Style Blog (an official publication of APA) answers questions about tricky citation issues. 

Although the Proquest interface is great for searching ERIC, ERIC Document citations work a little differently from other items. Do not use the citation that Proquest gives you. In APA 7th Edition format, your citations should lead to the free version (eric.ed.gov).

If your document has an ED number, and eric.ed.gov does provide the full text, it will look like this:

Hinton, S. (2007). Multicultural education online for graduate teachers: Some challenges (ED495857). ERIC. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED495857.pdf

If your document has an ED number, and eric.ed.gov does not provide the full text, it will look like this:

Dharmadasa, I. & Dharmadasa, K.H. (2003). Pre-service teachers' perspectives on multicultural education (ED482692). ERIC. https://eric.ed.gov/?q=ED482692

If your document has an EJ number, it is a journal article, not an ERIC document. Do a regular journal article citation without reference to ERIC.