Author: Patti Avellanet

APA Librarian Conference Travel Award: Apply by Nov. 30 for Spring 2017 Conferences

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Librarians

Do you work in an academic or health sciences library in the United States? Are you an early- or mid-career librarian? Are you looking for sources of funding for a conference you’d like to attend this spring?

If the answer to all of those questions is yes, please consider applying for an APA Librarian Conference Travel Award! Through November 30, 2016, we are accepting applications for conferences taking place from January to April 2017. This includes – but is not limited to – the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology, ALA Midwinter, Electronic Resources & Libraries, the ACRL 2017 Conference, Code4Lib, the ACRL Immersion Teaching with Technology Track, and the Annual Conference on the First Year Experience.

The award is intended to help defray conference-related expenses for librarians with less than 15 years of experience after receiving their MLS. Three cash awards are distributed three times each calendar year, and the application cycle opens and closes on a rolling basis. At this time, we are not limiting the conferences that are eligible for travel award funding. Applicants should identify the conference that best meets their professional needs, and explain how attendance will support their current duties and future goals.

Continue reading →

Tutorial Thursday: Finding Empirical Articles

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

It’s Tutorial Thursday! In this series, we explore APA’s extensive library of video tutorials, available on YouTube. Please feel free to link or embed videos or playlists in library websites or LibGuides, course management systems, or other locations where students, faculty, and researchers will find them.

The start of any semester brings new students to campus, but fall semester in particular brings with it a wave of students who may find themselves working with new and unfamiliar research tools and terminology.

How to identify and locate peer-reviewed articles is a common question at most academic library reference desks. For some social science classes, students must empirical studies that have been peer-reviewed. To aid students and others who need assistance with – or a refresher on – using PsycINFO® to locate this type of information, we have a brief tutorial on finding peer-reviewed, empirical articles. Continue reading →

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 →

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.

PsycINFO Expert Tip: Classification Codes

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

Have you ever noticed the Classification Codes in PsycINFO® and wondered what they’re for?

Screenshot of the Classification Codes limiter on APA PsycNET.

The Classification Codes limiter on APA PsycNET.

Our indexers tag and categorize each item in PsycINFO so searchers can more easily locate exactly what they need. Classification Codes categorize an item, such as a journal article, by its main theme. Each item receives one, sometimes two, Classification Codes. Continue reading →