Subject Guide for Psychology 2016H and 2017H

For this course, you are required to find "empirical" articles dealing with a specified topic in Psychology. In order to complete this assignment, you'll need to understand:

how to put together an effective keyword search;
how to use indexes to identify where and when articles have been published;
how to locate specific journal issues (online or in print) once you have identified which ones you need.

All of these concepts are covered in our Library Skills Tutorials. If you are not already familiar with these tutorials, you should read them now.

You can't learn everything you need to know about finding articles by reading a webpage or a tutorial. These aids will get you started, and from there you'll learn as you go. It takes time. As your needs change with each research project, you'll adapt what you already know and add new knowledge. Learning to use a library is an ongoing process, and you'll get better at it with experience. This webpage is always here to remind you of the specific resources you'll need to use for your Psychology assignments.

"Empirical" Articles

For the purposes of this course, "empirical" articles are those which have undergone the peer-review process. This means that articles published in the journal have been written by subject experts and approved by other subject experts before publication. Empirical articles are found in scholarly journals. For more information on scholarly journals, see our webpage about "Scholarly Vs. Popular Sources".

Empirical articles are NOT usually found in journals sold at magazine stores, or by using "Google" or other search engines on the web. Subscriptions to scholarly journals are sold to academic libraries and research centres, and to individual scholars, such as your professors. When Trent University subscribes to these journals online, we are required to limit access to current Trent students, faculty, and staff. Non-subscribers are denied access by the publisher. Google can't find the articles published in them because Google doesn't always have the authority to search them and show you the results.

Peer-reviewed journals are searched using indexes, and the Trent Library also subscribes to many of these. These indexes are the gateway to scholarly journal literature. You use them to find the important articles on your topic.

Choose your Index

There are many online indexes available to you on the library's Directory of Online & Databases webpage. Indexes are databases of journal article citations. The main goal of each index is to provide you with citations to the articles you need.

A citation is a description of an article. You write citations when you write up a bibliography for a paper. You provide the:

title and author of the article,
journal name, and
journal date, volume, issue, and page number.

Sometimes a citation in an index includes extra information, such as an abstract or the bibliography of the article. An abstract tells you what the article is about. The bibliography is useful to help you find other articles on the same topic.

Different indexes cover different journals and give various pieces of information. The reason we subscribe to so many of them is that each one has a different focus. There is no one place where you can find everything on a topic.

Remember that indexes tell you where and when the articles were published, but they don't tell you what's in a particular library . When you find a good citation, the next step is getting to the article. See below, "Finding the Articles", for help with that step.

There is a list of all the useful Psychology indexes on the Psychology Subject Guide page.

You'll want to use the 2 main Psychology indexes for your PSYC 2016H or 2017H assignment: PsycINFO and Web of Science.

Connect to PsycINFO

PsycINFO is the largest and most comprehensive index for Psychology topics. It covers thousands of journals in various languages, and book chapters as well. Because it only deals with Psychology topics, it offers advanced search options:

Subject headings (called descriptors) which are relevant to Psychology are assigned to every article. This type of controlled vocabulary means that if you find one article on your topic, you can click on a descriptor to find other articles on the same topic. It helps you narrow down your topic efficiently.
A thesaurus helps you find the right term to search for in the descriptors. Since controlled vocabulary is used, you'll get better results by finding the specific term used to describe your topic. The thesaurus will give you:
- correct wording (accepted terms),
- more specific words (narrower terms),
- similar words (related terms),
- more general words (broader terms).
Find the thesaurus under the Search Tools tab.
Detailed descriptions of studies are provided so that you can limit your search to a type of population, a type of study, a location, or a publication type. Use the Advanced Search screen for this. You can limit your searching to a Publication Type of empirical study.
When you get your results, you can choose to view only the Peer-Reviewed Journals by clicking on the tab.
Detailed abstracts are provided for each citation, so that you can review the content of the article and decide if it's useful to you before locating it.
Author information provides author affiliation, to help you evaluate the article. Check to see who the authors are and where they work. Authors are searchable, too, so you can find out what else s/he has written. Subject experts tend to write more than one article about their subject, and this is an effective way to find more articles.
References list the bibliography of the paper - what this author read in order to write this article. Some of these are linked to citations for the articles. A good tip for finding more articles is to look at these references.
Since the PsycINFO database is part of the Scholars Portal Search interface, you can search other databases at the same time, by clicking on "Specific Databases". The SAGE Collection for Psychology and Scholars Portal Journals could be useful; other databases may apply to your specific topic.

See the webpage: Using PsycINFO Effectively and Expertly.

Connect to Web of Science

Web of Science is a unique database, because it allows you to follow articles backward and forward through time, using citation searching. You can use Web of Science to find articles by keyword or author, just like any other index. But with Web of Science you can also view the citations used in an article and follow them to find papers that have cited this paper or papers which have similar citations.

Web of Science provides subjects, called "keywords", but they aren't a controlled vocabulary, as they are in PsycINFO, so there are no restrictions on what words can be used. They aren't specific to Psychology, either, because Web of Science covers many other subjects. There isn't a thesaurus you can check for terms; it's really just a keyword search you're doing, so be creative and think about all possible keywords for your topic.

Web of Science provides information on authors, language, and document type (but nothing that specifies peer-reviewed). Almost all articles within this database are peer-reviewed, however.

When using Web of Science for Psychology, choose both the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Science Citation Index for full coverage.

See the webpage: Cited Reference Searching with Web of Science.

Other databases you might wish to search (after searching PsycINFO and Web of Science):

Browse or search psychology journals in Scholars Portal Journals. "Search" using the search boxes and add lines if you need more. Limit your results using the facets in the right-hand column. "Browse", by "Subject", then look under "Health Sciences" for "Psychiatry and Psychology". You can search within a specific journal once you select it.
Search SAGE Journals Online. There are 30 full text scholarly Psychology journals in the set.
Annual Reviews in Psychology.
ProQuest Nursing Journals.
Ovid Nursing Resources.

Keyword Searching

Give a lot of thought to your keywords before you start to search. Think about other terms that might be used to express the same ideas.

Think about:

plural/singular,
noun/verb/adjective,
narrower and broader terms.

The search engine won't interpret your search terms; it will only look for the letters you tell it to find. If your index has a thesaurus, use it to find more useful terms.

Make a list of all your possible keywords, so that you're prepared to do many different searches. Check the Keyword Searching tutorial to refresh your memory of how to use "and" and "or" and truncation.

The truncation symbol for PsycINFO and Web of Science is the asterisk: *.

Finding the Articles :

The purpose of an index is to tell you which journals have published the articles you want, regardless of whether or not your library has access to them. Although some indexes DO provide the full text of the articles they cite, this is not always the case.

PsycINFO and Web of Science do not provide the text of the articles. This should not discourage you from using them , however, because:

They are the BEST indexes for your topic and you need them to find the best articles.
There's a good chance we'll have the full text available from an e-journal provider.
Links between indexes and online journals are so seamless you probably won't even know where the full text is coming from.
You can get ANY article you need through our ILL service, if you have enough time.

The library catalogue (TOPCAT) and our Resource Locator tell you whether the library has access to the journal articles you find in your search. The link will connect you directly to the online article, if we have access to it from Trent. TOPCAT tells you if we have the journal on our library shelves. For more information on finding the articles, see the Finding Articles Tutorial: Online Journals and Print Journals.

Getting Help

There is help available at the library. Most of what you need to know is on a webpage, so spend some time on our website. For individual assistance, contact the Learning & Liaison Librarian for Psychology. We'll get you on the right track.

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Last Modified: December 16, 2011
Maintained by , Thomas J. Bata Library.