The most important indexing tool in education is Current Journals in Education which is part of the ERIC database. An index is a collection of citations to journal articles. Each citation will tell you the author, title of the article, title of the journal, volume number, issue number, and page numbers of the article. Most indexed citations are organized by subject heading or a subject specific controlled vocabulary. As in most reference tools there are indexes for general information and current events and indexes that are subject specific.
General indexes are good tools for researching current events and how they effect education.
A tool such as Readers' Guide will have citations to articles in Newsweek, Time, U.S. News and World Report which could give valuable information about news and social concerns of ordinary people. Specific indexes in a subject area you are researching is were you are likely to spend most of your time. In this handbook there is a comprehensive section on the ERIC database which is the most comprehensive indexing tool in education. Some other interesting indexing tools are Psychological Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, and Social Sciences Index . An abstracting tool is a special type of index.