New in PsycBOOKS: December 2015

In December 2015, APA added 4 new APA books and 17 landmark titles in psychology to PsycBOOKS. Past monthly update lists are available online. You can also view a list of sample titles or a full coverage list.

Bibliographic records are available through your PsycBOOKS vendor. You may also download RDA records directly from APA by following the instructions in the APA PsycNET Administrator Help Menu. Continue reading

New Terms Added to the PsycINFO Thesaurus

By Ian Galloway, Senior Vocabulary Development Specialist

We recently 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. All of the items included in APA databases – journal articles, books and book chapters, dissertations, and more – are represented by a record that is indexed, or tagged, with Index Terms from the Thesaurus. This allows someone searching a database to quickly find all of the items about a particular concept, such as Affirmative Therapy, Playfulness, or Transactional Leadership, no matter what terminology the authors used.

Keywords, Index Terms, and PsycINFO Classification Codes from a record in the PsycARTICLES database.

Keywords, Index Terms, and PsycINFO Classification Codes from a record in the PsycARTICLES database.

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Welcome!

Welcome to the APA Databases & Electronic Resources Blog. Here you’ll find all of the news and information you’ve come to expect from our newsletter, PsycINFO News, which we have retired with Volume 34, Issue 3.

You can keep up with this blog in several ways. Pull the RSS feed into your favorite reader, subscribe via email (see the sidebar for both of these options), or keep an eye out for an occasional digest sent to the PsycINFO Listserv.

Those of you who are loyal readers of the newsletter may wonder why we’ve chosen to retire it. Over the last few years, we often found the newsletter format did give not give us the flexibility to make a time-sensitive announcement. There were issues where we had more content than we were able to use – and issues where we only had one or two items. And because we haven’t produced a print version of the newsletter in several years, it began to seem less necessary to confine our communications to a print-based production schedule. And of course, once the PsycINFO News became web-based, using a PDF format became less relevant for delivery in the digital age.

And so, here we are, introducing the APA Databases & Electronic Resources Blog. You’ll find the usual announcements from PsycINFO News: online and in-person training opportunities, new or updated training materials, and new features in APA Databases. Blog posts will also highlight new journals and include the monthly list of books added to PsycBOOKS. And that’s not all – the blog will allow us to expand on what we covered in PsycINFO News, and we have a long list of ideas for posts, occasional features, irregular series, and more.

Questions, comments, or suggestions? Join the conversation! You can comment below, or send a note to us directly at psycinfo@apa.org.

Screenshot of slides from Beyond Subject Searching in PsycINFO

In Search of: Beyond Subject Searching in PsycINFO

APA’s training team provides a wide range of training options on an ongoing basis, including advanced webinars for librarians. This spring, we recorded these sessions and made them available on YouTube – a great option if you are unable to attend, want to share a session with colleagues, or find that the schedule doesn’t work for your time zone.

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Librarian's Resource Center

Back to School with APA Databases Training Materials

The influx of new faces and fresh perspectives that fall semester brings to an academic campus is refreshing – though it’s often hard to appreciate in the chaos of scheduling and managing requests for instruction and support.

In hopes that we can save you a little time as you prepare for instruction sessions that will require diving into PsycINFO and other APA Databases, this issue provides a quick overview of the training materials you’ll find in our Librarian’s Resource Center. You are welcome to embed, link, adapt, and modify these materials to meet the needs of your students, faculty, and others in need of research support.

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