This bibliometric study assesses literature sources of elementary and early childhood education documents by examining, over a 30-month period, documents entered into the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) data base by the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education. The document collection is sorted into three groups according to the orientation of the intended audience (research-, interpretation-, and practice-oriented documents) through the use of publication type codes. One hundred ERIC documents from both the "Current Index to Journals in Education" (CIJE) and the "Resources in Education" (RIE) subfiles of the ERIC data base were randomly selected from each of the three document groups. In order to test two hypotheses, that: (1) research-oriented publications would cite more literature, more recent literature, and draw more heavily on the literature of other disciplines than either interpretation- or practice-oriented publications; and (2) interpretation-oriented publications would cite more literature, more recent literature, and draw more heavily on literature from other disciplines than practice-oriented literature, the mean number of references per document was determined. Citation analyses were conducted to find median citation age and literature dispersion among 28 identified disciplines. Findings indicate that: (1) research-oriented publications cite less literature than interpretation-oriented documents and more than practice-oriented publications, cite the oldest literature, and draw more heavily on the literature of other disciplines than either practice- or interpretation-oriented documents; and (2) interpretation-oriented documents cite more literature and draw more heavily upon the literature of other disciplines than practice oriented documents; however, interpretation-oriented documents do not cite more recent literature. (RH)