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Psychology: Research Toolkit

Fall 2009
Course sites available in bSpace
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Questions about your library research?
Contact Susan Edwards (sedwards@library.berkeley.edu or 510-643-6224)

Finding Articles

• PsycInfo from the American Psychological Association is the core psychology research tool. It indexes peer reviewed articles, and has some great features -- such as the ability to find literature reviews, or articles that have a certain methodology (empirical, for example) or that have been published in the past few years. Here's a quick 2 page guide on how to search in PsycInfo UC-eLinks then makes it seamless (in many cases) to link directly to the article.
• Annual Reviews in Psychology and Annual Reviews in Clinical Psychology are good starting places -- they provide literature reviews of important and emerging areas of research.
• MIT CogNet includes the fulltext of journals, books and conference proceedings published by MIT in the cognitive sciences.
• Of course you know Google, but do you know if you use Google Scholar the Library allows Google to pass you through to library licensed content?
• CSA Illumina -- searches a combination of databases including PsycInfo, such as Sociological Abstracts, ERIC, HealthSciences, etc.
• Academic Search Complete interdisciplinary database with good coverage of psychology and the allied disciplines of sociology, public policy, law, economics, ethnic studies, etc.
• Hundreds of other electronic resources are available, listed by academic department (subject) or by title, or by type of content (newspapers, statistics, etc.)

Although there are several different "flavors" of databases, often you can make your searching more effective by using these features:

Power search features for most article databases:

• Use synonyms -- there are many ways to express a concept (teenager or teenagers or adolescent)
• Use "controlled vocabulary" (descriptors or subjects) if the database has them ... they bring related terms together. For example, do they use the term African American or Black?
• Use truncation to get different forms of the word, for example teenage* will retrieve teenagers, teenager, teenaged, etc.
• Use quotation marks when you want an "exact phrase"

Online Encyclopedia

Almost everyone loves and uses wikipedia -- but you know it isn't considered a scholarly source. Try the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences which provides scholarly overviews on various topics related to psychology. It includes sections on Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science, Clinical Psychology, Community Psychology, Psychology History and Fields and Psychiatry.

Citation Linker

Sometimes you find an article in a bibliography, a book or a footnote -- and you want to see if we have it. We have a very cool tool called the Citation Linker that searches through our online databases to see if it is available fulltext. If not, it sets up a search for the paper journal in Melvyl, and then allows you to request it through Interlibrary Loan if not at UCB.

Finding and Borrowing Books:

There are library catalogs that search for books in all the libraries of Berkeley, in all the UCs, from all over the U.S., or even internationally. When we don't have material enough here at UCB, you can borrow material through Interlibrary Loan. This is a fantastic service, and is free to you -- but it does take time! (Interlibrary Loan says that on average you should allow two weeks for delivery.)

Citing and Organizing Your Sources:

Citation and Paper Writing provides an overview of a variety of software that is available to organize your references and make it easy to format your citations and bibliography. We have a site license to RefWorks (freely available to UC Berkeley students and UCB alums) which is one way to format your citations, and it also includes the very useful "cite while you write" Word plug-in. You might also want to consider the web-friendly, free and open source Zoterowhich allows you to keep the full articles organized along with their citations, or the for-fee EndNote.

Off-Campus Access-- Proxy Server/VPN:

The Library pays for access to thousands of electronic journals, databases, etc. You can access these from off-campus, by following these directions.

Journal Citation Reports via ISI, Web of Knowledge

JCR includes a variety of tools to examine the impact of a journal, or a group of journals, in a field.

Comments? Suggestions? Please email me directly (sedwards@library.berkeley.edu) or leave them below.