Category: For Faculty

New Features Added to PsycINFO

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

PsycINFO® is APA’s flagship research database, providing access to records for journal articles, books, chapters, dissertations, and other scholarly psychological content, with extensive global and historical coverage, and full cited references.

APA strives to keep PsycINFO useful and relevant. This means that, every so often, we need to add a new field to the database. (In this context, a field provides a specific type of information about the article being described – age group of the participants, for example, or the methodology used.) This allows us to provide researchers and users in the behavioral sciences and related disciplines with improved usability and new tools to help retrieve content and conduct their research.

We bundle these changes together and add them all at once, in what we refer to as a “reload” or “refresh” of the database. On August 1, we released a refresh of PsycINFO that includes several new features. These new features are already available on APA PsycNET® and EBSCOhost; Ovid and ProQuest are working on uploading the changes. Our vendor partners implement reloads on different schedules, so check with your vendor or visit our Vendor Reload Status Update page for more information.

In the coming weeks, we will be providing more in-depth information on how these fields and features work, and where to find them as you search PsycINFO. We will also be offering webinars to demonstrate the features live. We’ll announce the schedule here as soon as it’s ready! Continue reading →

Webinar Alert: PsycINFO Sessions for Students & Faculty This Fall

Posted on by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Librarians, For Students
Keyboard with rainbow colors reflecting off of it

Google Keep note art by sage solar on flickr.

Our fall series of webinars for students and faculty is starting on September 28, 2016. Help us spread the word to faculty, students, and anyone who teaches research methods.

APA provides free training webinars tailored for PsycINFO® searchers at all levels of proficiency. We feature three 30-minute sessions: Basic Search, Advanced Search, and Results Management. The sessions may be taken separately, but we encourage interested students to take all three and offer the sessions on consecutive days. These webinars are an ideal way for students to get a refresher on PsycINFO if they have had training earlier in the semester.

Descriptions are provided below. Visit our website to register today for these no-cost sessions.

Research Methods instructors and other faculty: If you would like your students to attend for extra credit, we offer certificates of completion for each session.

We will provide information relevant to all search platforms including APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest. The platform used will be based on the needs of the attendees of each session. Continue reading →

PsycARTICLES Expert Tip: What Journals Are Included?

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians

PsycARTICLES®, our full-text database of articles published by APA and affiliated journals, is a rich resource of peer-reviewed articles dating back more than a century. Researchers can find the latest scholarship from across psychology and the behavioral sciences, and can also look back at the history and development of psychology.

But what’s in PsycARTICLES? As of today, the full-text of more than 100 journals is available, back to Volume 1, Issue 1 in most cases. One way to peruse the list of titles is to simply use the Browse menu on APA PsycNET, where you can choose to see the list alphabetically by title, or arranged by topic. (EBSCOhost, Ovid , and ProQuest offer a similar feature.)

Screenshot showing the Browse page for PsycARTICLES on APA PsycNET

Browsing PsycARTICLES on APA PsycNET.

The advantage of using the Browse function built into PsycARTICLES is that you can easily access individual issues of each journal, and from there the full-text of individual articles. However, we also have the full list on our website, where you can easily see the years of publication available, as well as the volumes. This can be helpful if you simply want to quickly check whether or not a particular publication is included.

Screenshot of PsycARTICLES coverage list from the APA website.

The full list of journals in PsycARTICLES is available on the APA website.

 

We also provide access to a document that details any name changes for journals covered in PsycARTICLES.

This information, and more, can be found on the PsycARTICLES Coverage Information webpage. You can find coverage information for our other databases in the Search Help and Training Center.

In Case You Missed It: New Terms Added to the PsycINFO Thesaurus

Posted on by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

In November 2015, we released an update to The Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms, the source of the controlled vocabulary used in indexing PsycINFO® and the other APA databases. This particular update was significantly larger than previous vocabulary updates, containing 227 new Index Terms.

In December, we shared the details of the update, highlighting some of the new terms and other changes that were incorporated. We also provided a document with the full list of Index Terms included in the update.

Did you miss that post? Take a look! It explains several important points about the new terminology, including a change to the language used to tag research on Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Related Resources

Changes to the Thesaurus sometimes impact search alerts and saved searches. For example, when a new term replaces an older term, saved searches and search alerts created with the older term will no longer generate updates. In this update, 5 terms were changed such that any saved searches or search alerts that use them will no longer retrieve the desired results.

Here are the terms that were changed, along with the new Index Terms that have taken their places:

Terms that are now Use references New Index Terms to search
Aspergers Syndrome
Autism
Pervasive Developmental Disorders		 Autism Spectrum Disorders
Complications (Disorders) Sequelae
Q Sort Testing Technique Q-Sort

 

For assistance in updating your search alerts, please see our post PsycINFO Expert Tip: Updating Search Alerts When a Thesaurus Term Changes.

Exhibits Update: American Psychological Association Annual Convention

Posted on by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

APA Conference Header image

The American Psychological Association Annual Convention will be held at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO, from August 4-7, 2016. Look for representatives from the American Psychological Association’s Databases and Electronic Resources group in the exhibit hall, at booth 438. Stop by to learn more about APA Style CENTRAL®, an exciting new electronic resource for APA Style®, and get the latest updates about APA Journals, Books, and Databases.

Throughout the conference, stop by for a demo of APA Style CENTRAL. You’ll receive a voucher for a free t-shirt, and will be eligible to enter a raffle to win an executive duffle or backpack. We also hope you’ll join us for a reception to celebrate the launch of APA Style CENTRAL. The reception will be held in booth 438 on Friday, from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Exhibit Hours:

  • Thursday, August 4: 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. (Unopposed exhibits-only hour: 4:00 – 5:00 p.m.)
  • Friday, August 5: 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. (Unopposed exhibits-only hour: 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.)
  • Saturday, August 6: 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. (Coffee with the Exhibitors: 10:00 – 11:00 a.m.)
  • Sunday, August 7: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

 

This post has been edited to correct the date of the APA Style CENTRAL reception.