Sample searches from the Management Topic Guide.
Librarians know that PsycINFO® is a wealth of information not just for psychology, but for many other topics as well. After all, our behavior impacts everything we do, so there is an aspect of behavioral science to nearly every discipline.
Students, however, are often unaware of this and think of PsycINFO, and other APA databases, as only covering topics in psychology.
Topic Guides are an instructional aid designed to help make the case as to why a student in a health sciences, education, or management class should consider searching PsycINFO.
At this time, 20 different interdisciplinary Topic Guides are available on our website. Each contains three sample search scenarios, and a list of selected Index Terms. This helps students get a sense of the way in which behavioral scientists engage with these disciplines, and the language to use to find that information in PsycINFO.
Topic Guides are not platform specific, but have been designed to pair with our Quick Reference Guides, which demonstrate how to search PsycINFO on APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, ProQuest or Ovid. They also make a great in-class handout if you’d like to provide your students with a few minutes to explore on their own.
We provide each guide in two formats. A full-color PDF that you can download and print at your institution, and a PowerPoint file that contains only the text, so that you can easily incorporate any portions of the guide that you like into existing instruction materials.
Selected search terms from the PowerPoint version of the Nutrition Topic Guide.
Readers who have used these previously will note that we’ve refreshed the design; at the same time, we tweaked the layout of the print version. If you’ve used these before, we hope you’ll find that the printable version is easier to work with.
Many of the guides that are currently available were requested by librarians. Do you have an idea for a Topic Guide? Let us know by commenting here or sending a note to psycinfo@apa.org.
Related Resources:
We’ve taken three Topic Guides and created video tutorials demonstrating the sample searches. The links below will load playlists, where you’ll find a version of each video for the APA PsycNET®, EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest platforms.
