Library Resources for Research in Psychology
I. Sources for Locating Journal ArticlesThis is the premier resource for locating citations and abstracts to articles in psychology and related disciplines. Cited articles include reports of the results of original empirical research as well as literature reviews, case studies, dissertations, and other means of psychological discourse. It covers over 1400 journals in more than 30 languages, and has references dating back to the 1870s, although the bulk of the citations date from about 1967 to the present. The Ovid system, through which Northwestern subscribes to PsycINFO, offers standard search fields: keywords, authors, journal titles, article titles, etc. However, it is PsycINFO's subject thesaurus that make it such a powerful database. In addition to compiling the citation data that makes up PsycINFO, the American Psychological Association has maintained a thesaurus of psychological terminology that comprise the topical index for PsycINFO as well as its printed equivalent, Psychological Abstracts. The thesaurus organizes the world of psychology and related topics into discrete terms with hierarchies of broader, narrower and related terms. Terms are selected from this thesaurus and applied to each record in the database, allowing for very precise searching You can take advantage of PsycINFO's thesaurus by several means. The easiest is to check the box labeled"Map Term to Subject Heading" that is adjacent to the main search line.
With this box checked, the database will attempt to match the word or phrase that you enter to the closest available subject heading in the thesaurus. For the example above, PsycINFO returns the following results:
The system has identified "Deception"
as the thesaurus term most closely matching "lying." Frequently,
although not in all cases, you may view a definition of the term
by clicking on the
PsycINFO allows a couple of options when searching using a thesaurus term. First, you may Auto Explode the term. This will search for the main heading and all its narrower terms as one set. In the above example, selecting Auto Explode for "Deception" will retrieve 2169 citations plus 362 that include the subject heading "Cheating," plus 121 with "Confabulation," 472 with "Faking," 73 with "Fraud," and 790 with "Malingering." The Focus option, on the other hand, assures that the citations you are retrieving include your selected subject heading as a primary topic. Each record in PsycINFO may have up to a dozen assigned subject headings, some of which refer to secondary topics within the article. To search only for articles with your term as a main topic, select check the Focus box next to its thesaurus entry. After you've selected a subject heading, click the "Continue" button to execute the search. You may use PsycINFO's Combine and Limit features respectively to combine search sets and to narrow your search results with a variety of criteria like the age or gender of the population studied in the article, English language publications, and type of article: empirical study, literature review, case study, etc. You may combine or limit any search set created during your current PsycINFO session—the system is keeping a running tally of your searches and the results they retrieved.
Northwestern recently acquired an add-on to PsycINFO called PsycARTICLES, a collection of 42 full-text electronic journals published by the American Psychological Association. Whenever your search results include an article that is available from the PsycARTICLES collection, you'll see the Ovid Full Text link adjacent to the article information in the list of citations.
In addition, you may limit your PsycINFO searches to retrieve only articles where online full text is available. Before executing a search, check the "Ovid Full Text Available" box in the Limit to: section below the main search line.
Keep in mind, however, that the PsycARTICLES collection is only 42 journals out of more than 1400 covered by the database. By limiting your search only to citations with full text available, you may be missing key resources for your topic.
Julie Borden |
icon. To see how "Deception" fits into the rest of the
thesaurus, click on the term.
