Love Library is available at You can also access the site through UNL’s Home page ( click on the Quick Links and look for Libraries.
Use the Encore Search (left side of screen) to look up books (by either title or author) or journal titles.
Use Electronic Journal Finder (from e-Resources from the roll-over navigation bar at top) to find full text articles from journals UNL owns.
You can request any of these items (books or copies of articles) through Inter-Library Loan (ILLiad). You will have to register for this once; be sure to put that you are a distance education student, so that materials will be mailed to you.
Use the Articles, Full-Text & more (lower left of screen) to search for and look up articles. You can click on E or Education and then find ERIC-FirstSearch. You will have to type in your last name and UNL ID number to access this resource from off-campus.
In ERIC, you can search by all kinds of things. Usually, you will search by author, journal title, article title, or keyword (or some combination of these). Try refining your search by restricting it to recent articles, articles in English, etc. You don’t need to restrict your search to articles available at UNL since Inter-Library Loan can get you most articles.
When using keywords to search, try variations of words (math, mathematics) as well as synonyms (middle level, middle school) to help find articles.
JSTOR is an option for finding full-text articles. It has a smaller selection than ERIC, and the newest articles are 5 years old.
An excellent place to find references is in the bibliography of research articles you have already. Sometimes you only need to find one good article on your subject, and then by using that author’s references, you can quickly branch out to find lots of good sources.
Another good tip is to look up other articles by the same author, once you find one good article by a given author (or authors).
main screen
Library Search
Below is a list of suggestions for keywords as you begin to look for articles around the curriculum:
- Curriculum Studies
- Math curriculum
- Mathematics curriculum
- Curriculum
- Elementary math curriculum
- Curriculum development
- Curriculum analysis
There are several ways to do this keyword search:
- Keywords must be included in the title of the article
- Keywords must be included within the text of the article
- Keywords must be included within the abstract of the article
How you decide to proceed is up to you.
Remember, your sample must come from the body of scholarly articles.
Finally, the ideas from these articles are to be integrated throughout your final paper.
You may want to search in JSTOR or ERIC (if you use ERIC, if the full text of an article is not available, use Love Library’s Electronic Journal Finder to find the full text).