Reference Q--who's good with ERIC and descriptor-savvy?

[amy.m...@library.med.nyu.edu]

Howdy all,

I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets a lot of reference questions
from friends-of-friends as soon as they learn I'm a librarian. I'm
not as savvy with ERIC as some, and wanted to mine you-all for
information before I started reinventing wheels over here.

My patron is needing descriptors for the African American and Latino
ethnic groups for a long time span. Anyone know where I can get
these?

Any help with this (or pointers to someone else who can help me) is
greatly appreciated.
I haven't done any research at all at this point, so forgive me if the
answer's obvious.

much obliged,

A

Here's the question:

My dissertation is examining the way in which education researchers
present research that covers African American and Latino students.

I am interested in utilizing education journals and articles as the
population for my research. So, I have decided that I want to use ERIC
to find all of these articles. My issue is which descriptors to use in
ERIC that will cover both groups over the period of 1950-2006. I want
to make sure I have all of the empirical education articles found in
education journals that include either of the groups in the research
sample.