Since the linear elastic fracture analysis has been proved to be insufficient in predicting the failure of strain hardening materials, a number of fracture concepts have been studied which remain applicable in the presence of plasticity near a crack tip. This work thereby presents a new finite element model to predict the elastic-plastic crack-tip field and fatigue life of center-cracked panels(CCP) with ductile fracture under large-scale yielding conditions. Also, this study has been carried out to investigate the path-dependence of J-integral within the plastic zone for elastic-perfectly plastic, bilinear elastic-plastic, and nonlinear elastic-plastic materials. Based on the incremental theory of plasticity, the p-version finite element is employed to account for the accurate values of J-integral, the most dominant fracture parameter, and the shape of plastic zone near a crack tip by using the J-integral method. To predict the fatigue life, the conventional Paris law has been modified by substituting the range of J-value denoted by ${Delta}J$ for ${Delta}K$. The experimental fatigue test is conducted with five CCP specimens to validate the accuracy of the proposed model. It is noted that the relationship between the crack length a and ${Delta}K$ in LEFM analysis shows a strong linearity, on the other hand, the nonlinear relationship between a and ${Delta}J$ is detected in EPFM analysis. Therefore, this trend will be depended especially in the case of large scale yielding. The numerical results by the proposed model are compared with the theoretical solutions in literatures, experimental results, and the numerical solutions by the conventional h-version of the finite element method.