Doing Literature Research in Psychology

You already have substantial experience in searching for material on line. There are innumerable search engines available for finding information on virtually any topic (including psychology).

However, properly documented, scientifically-sound findings in which we can place confidence are only found in peer-reviewed articles that appear in psychological journals. In general, this type of information is inaccessable using standard search techniques.

Fortunately, a service of the American Psychological Association called PsycINFO provides accessibility to these essential resources.

PsycINFO is a database which provides bibliographic citations and abstracts for psychological journal articles, dissertations, technical reports, books, and book chapters published worldwide from 1887 to the present.

There are currently more than 2,500,000 articles included in the database. PsycINFO is updated weekly with approximately 1,000 new articles being added each week.

Access to PsycINFO is by subscription only. Most universities have site licenses to permit access to the database by students, faculty, and researches.

Doing Literature Research in Psychology

You can access the PsycINFO database via the campus network or from off campus. Enter the URL http://academic.shu.edu/libraries/db/

Click on the Letter “P” since Psychology

begins with that letter

The last three entries are relevant

Using the psycINFO Database

Topic

Keywords

Author

Institutional Affiliation

Year (Range of Years)

Journal Source

Any Combination of These Criteria

Using the psycINFO Database

Topic – Most Common Search

Search must be sufficiently narrowed to yield a workable number of “hits”

Use of Boolean Operators in the Search Terms

AND

OR

NOT

Limitations of the psycINFO DatabaseThe psycINFO database does not contain any actual published articles. It only contains Abstracts (Summaries, usually less than 150 words) of published articles.

psycArticlesPsycARTICLES is another service of the American Psychological Association. The basic idea is great – to provide online access to full-text articles published in the field of psychology. Unfortunately, this service has been implemented only in a very limited way.

World-wide there are more than 1400 different journals of psychology which collectively have published more than 2,500,000 articles.

PsycArticles contains full-text from only 71 different journals with a total of 143,000 articles being included. Fortunately, the 71 journals included are some of the most important journals in our field. But many essential journals are not yet included.

The ProQuest DatabaseThe third database (listed as “Psychology Journals” on the library database page) gives us access to numerous other full-text articles through a service called ProQuest. Unfortunately, coverage is limited to recent calendar years and the journal list is far from comprehensive.