Advanced Research Tutorial for Psychology
Concepts covered:
BOOKS
The published research for psychology is distributed between books and journal
articles at a ratio of approximately 30/70, and you will use both sources when
researching your essay topics. The Library has a large and growing number
of excellent books and videos on psychological topics, selected by your
instructors and the librarian responsible for psychology. Remember that good books
and articles will
have bibliographies in them which may direct you to other relevant material on
your topic in articles and other books.
The Library's reference collection contains hundreds of specialized
encyclopedias and handbooks for every discipline. Use these for background
reading on your topic, to help you choose keywords, and for assistance in
narrowing or broadening your topic. As a Psychology student, you will find the following
encyclopedias especially useful:
The Encyclopedia of Psychology
Edited by Alan Kazdin
REF BF 31 E52 2000 Nanaimo
Encyclopedia of Psychiatry, Psychology and Psychoanalysis
Edited by Benjamin
Wolman
REF RC 437 E49 1996 Nanaimo
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Edited by Anthony Manstead
REF HM 251 B476 1995 Nanaimo & Cowichan
Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
Edited by W. Edward Craighead
REF BF 31 E52 2001, Volumes 1-4, Nanaimo
Dictionaries of psychology may also prove useful:
American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology
REF BF 31 V295 2006 Nanaimo, Cowichan & Powell River
Dictionary of Theories, Laws and Concepts in Psychology
Jon E. Roeckelein
REF BF 31 R625 1998 Nanaimo
If the Library does not own enough books on your topic, you might try broadening
your topic with the help of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, in the
hope of finding books that may have relevant chapters on your topic in
them. These volumes are located behind the Information Desk in the Nanaimo
Campus Library and close to the online catalogue computers in
the Cowichan and Powell River Libraries. Return to
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SEARCHING OTHER CATALOGUES - You might also search for your topic in the online catalogues
at University of Victoria or the University of British Columbia. These are
accessible from the blue "Other library catalogues" button from Malaspina Library's
online catalogue, subheading Provincial. The Library will borrow materials from other libraries
on your behalf using interlibrary
loan
services. Return
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SUBJECT WEBLINKS
The more scholarly websites on many psychological topics have been compiled by
the Psychology librarian, and can be accessed via hotlinks from any search in the
online catalogue. Your instructors have compiled similar lists of
websites; these may be accessed from the Psychology
Links button from the Psychology Department homepage. The Psychology
category maintained by Yahoo also provides a subject directory to Psychology
websites. See also the Introduction to Internet
Search Engines research tutorial for additional information on searching the web.
Your Suggestions Are Welcome
If you feel that the Library should consider adding a website to its
catalogue or a book title to its collection, please suggest this to the
reference librarian on duty. Your recommendation will be passed to the
librarian responsible for that area for consideration. Return
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JOURNALS
To obtain maximum value from this research tutorial, you should firstly have read and
understood the concepts covered in the Introduction to
Journals and Article Indexes tutorial.
In the Introduction to Journals and Article Indexes
research tutorial, you learned some
basics on journals and how to use a general article index. A general
article index, such as CBCA Complete, Academic Search Elite, ArticleFirst and
Ingenta, provides index coverage for
all subjects, although the number of journals devoted to any one discipline
may be quite small. This research tutorial will
focus on specific indexes of importance to Psychology.
Article indexes that cover a single discipline do so as comprehensively as
possible. Usually they index more than just journal articles, and may
include speeches, chapters in books, books, theses, conference proceedings,
etc. The premiere journal index for Psychology is Psychological
Abstracts, the electronic version of which is known as PsycINFO.
It provides indexing to more than 1,600 Psychology journals published worldwide.
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ASK FOR ASSISTANCE WHEN
SEARCHING FOR JOURNAL ARTICLES
When you need to find journal articles on any topic, begin by asking the
reference librarian for help. The librarian will ask you some questions
about your topic so that he/she can identify the correct article index to use
for that topic. The Library has access to several dozen article indexes,
on a variety of topics and for several geographical areas, including
international coverage for certain disciplines. They come in a variety of
formats, just like the journals - in paper format, on microform, on CD-ROM, and online from the Internet, etc. Once you know how
to use and decipher one article index, you can usually handle another with only
minimal instruction. They all pretty much operate the same way.
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ACCESSING PsycINFO
To get to the web-based article indexes from the Library's
homepage, click on Search
for Resources, and then Full Service MARLIN (Login). Log
in to Marlin using your student ID and Library PIN. Click on Articles and Databases from the
blue banner. A short list of subheadings will be displayed:
WebCat
® Online Public Access Catalog © Sirsi Corporation
Choose the SOCIAL SCIENCES and GOVERNMENT subheading, and then select Psychological
Abstracts (PsycINFO). PsycINFO is international in scope and
provides citations from more than 1,600 journals, from 1887 to the present date. This index,
like many, provides citations and abstracts to relevant articles, books,
chapters, and dissertations. This EBSCOhost version of PsycINFO also
provides hyperlinks to the full text for many articles.
The default screen is set for a Basic or Keyword Search, denoted by the green
tab in the EBSCOhost tool bar banner:
Acknowledgements: We gratefully acknowledge both the American
Psychological Association and EBSCOhost for their respective permissions to use
screen captures from the PsycINFO database throughout this tutorial.
Material from the PsycINFO database is copyrighted and is used with permission
of the American Psychological Association.
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CHOOSING YOUR SEARCH TERMS
The topic you will use by way of example in PsycINFO will be "attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder." There are several ways to refer to
this disorder. They are:
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
ADHD
attention deficit disorder
ADD.
In many of the other Research Tutorials, you are encouraged to search using
your keywords, scan the results, and perhaps redo your search in a subject
mode. While this is fairly efficient in other journal indexes, it is
inefficient in PsycINFO. Why? Firstly, PsycINFO is a very
large database providing indexing to over 1,600 psychological journals
worldwide and covers the psychological literature as far back as 1887; keyword
searches typically yield too many imprecise results. Secondly, PsycINFO, more than most other journal indexes, uses a
structured vocabulary to index all aspects of psychological research. It
is recommended that you search this index using the same structured vocabulary
that the index uses. This structured vocabulary of subject headings and
other parameters is accessed by using the online Thesaurus. You access the
Thesaurus from the green tool bar.
Type in the term "attention deficit" onto the Thesaurus Browse search command line. Then click on
the Browse button.
The database responds with a list of search terms that are related to your
search term.
There appear to be two subject headings for this concept. Let's click
on the hyperlinked heading "Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity"
to get more information on this topic.
This screen advises that the subject heading was established in 2001. The scope
note provides you with a definition for this new heading. It
also advises that you must use both "Attention Deficit Disorder" and
"Hyperkinesis" to access citations published prior to 2000. Broader and related terms are also provided, and these may or may
not be useful to you, depending upon your focus.
You may click on the little box to the left of "Attention Deficit
Disorder with Hyperactivity" and then click on Search, but you would be
accessing only those citations that have been added to the database since
January 2001. If you decide to do a basic
or keyword search for "attention deficit disorder" thinking that, since
these words are common to two of the subject headings, this will catch all relevant
citations, you will miss the citations which discuss hyperkinesis.
Clearly, you will want to perform a new search that will include the
citations before 2001 which have "Attention Deficit Disorder" or
"Hyperkinesis" as a subject, as well as those citations added since January 2001 which have been given the
new subject heading "Attention Deficit Disorder with
Hyperactivity." Click on the Basic Search Keyword tab and type in
the search for all three concepts: "attention deficit disorder"
OR hyperkinesis OR "attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity" as follows:
Notice that quotation marks have been placed around the phrases
"attention deficit disorder" and "attention deficit disorder with
hyperactivity" although the search line is too short to see all elements of
the search command at one time. The quotation marks will ensure that PsycINFO searches
for these words as phrases, rather than as individual words anywhere in the
citations. Also notice that the Boolean operator OR has been used to
separate the three search concepts. We are asking that the database find
all citations that have at least one of these subjects assigned to them. (See Appendix - Boolean Search Operators for additional information.)
The database responds that there are 11,951citations that have at least
one of the three subjects we specified in the search command.
Whew! This search needs to be limited or narrowed in some way so that it
is more manageable. There are many ways to narrow a topic - by adding another
concept, specifying a population you want to study in depth, limiting the search
by a publication date range, etc. We
will narrow this search down by specifying a population. To do this, you
would click
on the blue tab marked Refine Search (the tab will then turn green to indicate
that it is active), and the index will respond with your
search repeated in the command line, and with a set of limiter fields ready for
your input.
We will narrow our search by selecting Young Adulthood (18-29 yrs) from the
Age Groups menu, and by selecting Male from the population pull down menu, then
clicking on the Search button. The database sorts out from the original
result list of over 11,951 citations the much smaller set of 527 citations
that meet both of these limiters.
You will notice that just below each citation, a Cited References hyperlink and the number of
references cited by that article appear in the brief record lists for your PsycINFO
searches. The Cited References link will take you to the bibliography or
references cited list for that article.
Also notice that the Where can I get this Item? icon is at the bottom of
each brief citation. You will need this icon to determine whether or not
Malaspina has access to that specific article.
We will now explore several of these citations in more detail, namely
numbers 1, 13, 14, 144 and 121. When you click on the Add icon for each of
these citations, the folder icon to the right opens. The database places
the "added" citations in
the Folder for further study.
You can then access the 5 selected citations inside the folder by clicking on the
hyperlinked words "Folder has items."
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CITATION SAMPLES:
At this point, you will want to access these five articles themselves.
You can view the full record for each citation by clicking on the hyperlinked
article titles. Doing so will provide you with a wealth of information on
the article, such as the author's address, subject headings, and an abstract.
You can find out how to access the articles themselves through the holdings
screen
by clicking on the Where can I get this item? icon from the bottom of each
citation or from the bottom of the full record for each citation. Let's
look at the holdings screen for the first citation in our folder.
(a) Item Available
Full Text in Another Database:
It turns out that this article is available online from another database to
which we subscribe, namely ScienceDirect. By clicking on the hyperlinked
article title provided in this holdings screen, you will be taken directly to
the full text of this article in ScienceDirect. This one was easy!
You will be pleased to know that many if not most of the articles you need
from PsycINFO are now available this way due to several new database purchases
which are all linked together.
(b) Item Available on
Interlibrary Loan:
When you click on the Where Can I Get This Item? for
Citation 2 from our folder, we learn that Malaspina does not own a subscription
to the journal International Journal of Disability, Development and
Education. However, if you have two
weeks of lead time, you might consider making an interlibrary loan request for
the article by clicking on the hyperlinked words "Check other library catalogues
or request an Interlibrary Loan" and then clicking on "Place an
Interlibrary Loan Request" from the subsequent screen,
and completing the online form that will be displayed.
We wish to thank the Open Learning Agency for their permission
to use screen captures from the Electronic Library Network throughout this
tutorial.
Once your online ILL request has been electronically received by the
Library's staff, we will ask another library in North America to send us a
photocopy of the article on your behalf. The article will be kept at the
Service Desk on the campus you specified in your request form. This request
may take two to three weeks to be filled. You should remember this, and do
your research well in advance of your due date so that you can take advantage of
interlibrary
loan services when needed. Click here to watch the animated tutorial
How to Request a Journal Article on Interlibrary Loan.
There are limits to the number of interlibrary loan requests you may make in
an academic year. First- and second-year students are permitted 20 ILL
requests per year; third- and fourth-year students are permitted 40 such
requests. Faculty, staff and graduate students are permitted 50 ILL requests from July 1-June
30. Return to
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(c). Citation Linked to Full Text
Citation 3 from our folder has an icon indicating that the PDF full text
is linked.
When you click on the PDF Full Text icon for this citation, the
following screen displays the PDF format of the needed article, partially
displayed below:
Since this is an Adobe Acrobat PDF document, remember to use the save, print
and email icons from the Adobe toolbar just above the document whenever you need
these functions.
(d) Dissertations
Masters and doctoral dissertations may also show up in a PsycINFO search, and Citation 4
from the folder list is exactly that.
This is a notice of the thesis research topic that Saybrook Graduate School
and Research Center
student Paula Cawley chose for her PhD degree (presumably although this is
not given in the full display). The actual abstract of the thesis is
provided in the full display for this citation.
Some theses are available full text online via a service called ProQuest Digital
Dissertations, and if Paula Cawley has actually finished this thesis, you might
be able to retrieve it. You would need to toggle to the online catalogue and do a keyword or
title search for "proquest digital dissertations" and hyperlink into
this database from the Display record. You can also get to the Proquest
database by clicking on Articles and Databases from the blue banner in the
Marlin catalogue,
and then clicking on the All Subjects subheading; the Dissertations and Theses
choice will get you to the ProQuest Digital Dissertations database, too.
Once there, you would search for this
thesis by author, keyword in the title, or title. You will learn that this
is, indeed, a PhD thesis. Often ProQuest Digital Dissertations will
provide the first 24 pages online (like this one) and even the whole thesis free online.
If the thesis is not full text online, you can decide
to order the thesis online yourself at an average cost of $50 US, or you can ask
the Library to find a copy on interlibrary loan for you. Interlibrary
loans for theses can take several weeks to several months to arrive, however.
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(e) Chapter in a Book
The last citation in our Folder list turns out to be a chapter in a book.
When you click on the Where Can I Get This Item? hyperlink from the folder,
the following holdings screen displays:
It turns out that Malaspina does own this book, so you will be able to read
the chapter you need.
If it had turned out that Malaspina did not own this book, you could decide to
request the book on interlibrary loan. Click here
to learn more about the Library's interlibrary loan services or watch the
animated tutorial
How to Request a Book on Interlibrary Loan.
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ADVANCED FEATURES OF PSYCINFO
a. Advanced Search Button
PsycINFO has a number of advanced features that will help you refine
your searches in this very comprehensive and powerful database. When you
select to search using the Advanced Search button, you will be able to combine
search terms using Field Codes (AU, TI, SU, etc.) and an expanded set of limiter
fields. Return to
top.
b. Search History and Combining Searches
The Search History tab becomes an option only once you have selected
the Advanced Search button. Your subsequent searches are then itemized in
a list that can be manipulated in various ways. Let's assume that you
want to do a basic or keyword for "personal growth," and obtain 1831 citations. You then do a second Advanced Search for
the subject "group
development." (Notice that the SU Subjects option can be selected
from a pull down menu.) This second search yields 312
citations. Make sure that you click on the Search History/Alerts tab
to see this feature.
Your two searches are itemized in the Search History/Alerts list. You can now
combine them by clicking on the little box for Set S1 in the "Add to Search"
column, and ensuring that the Boolean operator is set
for "and" in the Add using box. Then you would click on the grey
Add button. The set S1 is then added to the set for group development
(being S2) and the search string is
placed in the search command line for you.
If everything looks good, click on the grey Search button
to start the search.
The index responds that there is only 1 citation that contains both of these
concepts. PsycINFO has sure whittled your search down from 1831 and 312
citations!
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c. Search Alert Service
You may want to take advantage of another advanced feature called
Search Alerts. In addition, you can set up an alert service with PsycINFO
so that you will be notified via email when new articles on your topics are
added to the index. This feature is an option from the Search
History/Alerts tab once you have performed the search you are interested in following
up on.
The reference librarian will be happy to assist you in using
these advanced features successfully. Return to
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ONLINE HELP
Like all good electronic journal indexes, PsycINFO provides an
online Help button, which can be used at any time. Don't forget that the
Reference Librarian is also available to assist you in person when you visit the
Library, and by phone (250) 740-6151, Monday-Thursday 9:00am-6:00pm, and
Friday 9:00am-5:00pm during the academic year.
In addition, you may request assistance by email by clicking on the Ask a
Librarian! button available from most MARLIN catalogue screens or by emailing
reference@mala.bc.ca. And
lastly, you may want to ask for assistance through the instant chat service
called AskAway at http://www.askaway.org.
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OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCES INDEXES
While PsycINFO is the premier index for psychological topics, it
is not the only index you might consider. In fact, it is rare that you
would use only one journal index to find articles on a topic. The
reference librarians will help you by suggesting other indexes that would be
useful to you so that all aspects of your topic are covered.
For the topic of adults with ADHD, you might consider using CBCA Complete, available from the All Subjects article indexes
screen, to find out what Canadian researchers have been publishing in Canadian
journals. Academic Search Elite, also available from the All Subjects article indexes
screen, may provide you with some full text articles on this topic to get you
started, as it indexes a large number of medical and psychological journals.
Another useful database might be Sociological Abstracts,
available from the Social Sciences and Government article indexes screen.
On the other hand, if you were interested in children with ADHD, you would be
directed to use some of the Education article indexes, and maybe Child
Abuse and Neglect since many hyperactive children are abused. Lastly, PubMed,
found in the Health and Sciences article indexes, may be useful for
psycho-medical topics.
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SOME ARTICLES ARE NOT INDEXED
Not all journals are indexed, and sometimes an article you want has been so
recently published that the indexing companies have not had a chance to enter
the data into their indexes. For these times, you will need to browse
through recent issues of the journal looking for the article you need.
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HOW MUCH RESEARCH IS ENOUGH?
Be sure to discuss with your instructor how many references are
expected for the essay. In the absence of a specific number of references
from your instructor, you can use this rule of thumb: use one good
reference for each double-spaced typed page of essay. This is only a
guideline. You also need to be sure that you are informed enough on your
topic that you can discuss all the major aspects of your topic, both pro and
con. Return to
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APA STYLE GUIDES (PRINTED AND ONLINE)
It is likely that your instructors will require that your essays be submitted in
the style approved by the American Psychological Association (APA). The
Library has the printed version of this style guide:
Publication Manual of the American Psychological
Association 5th edition
BF 76.7 P83 2001, Nanaimo, Cowichan and Powell River
Stacks, Reserves and Reference collections.
In addition, there are several online style guide resources that will help
you use and understand the APA style guide. The Psychology Department's homepage
refers you to an APA style guide website,
which may also be helpful in this regard.
Lastly, the Research Tutorial entitled How
to Cite Your Sources also provides information on how to refer to
psychological citations in the APA style.
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