Category: For Faculty

APA Style CENTRAL – Adding References to Papers

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

Today we’d like to highlight one of our APA Style CENTRAL handouts, “APA Style CENTRAL® Adding References to Papers” (PDF, 437K). Please feel free to link to this handout where students, faculty, and researchers will find it!

APA Style CENTRAL provides each user with a personal digital library of “My References” for saving references to cite in their papers. The APA Style CENTRAL “Adding References to Papers” handout outlines the process of adding references to your digital library, using My References to build a specific paper’s reference list, and easily creating in-text citations.

Details include:

  • The three (3) ways of adding references to your library: Searching PsycINFO, RIS import, and using one of more than 80 reference templates to ensure a properly formatted reference;
  • The Paper Reference List functionality for managing a paper’s unique reference list; and
  • Using the Find and Cite Reference tool to create properly formatted cited references.

Want to learn more? You’ll find this handout on our APA Style CENTRAL® Handouts and Guides page, where we will continue to add handouts and documentation for users and administrators as they become available.

Do you have a “how-to” question about APA Style CENTRAL or some aspect of it you’d like to know more about? Please let us know!

APA PsycInfo Expert Tip: Online First Publications

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

What is an Online First Publication?

Online First Publication, also called OFP or First Posting, is a publication status that you may see for journal articles in the APA PsycArticles® database. It means that an article has been published online ahead of its journal issue. You can think of it like an artist’s single that premiers ahead of the full album.

How does this early publishing work?

Most scholarly journals release new issues once every month or once every quarter. When an article has been accepted for publication, and the author and publisher have completed any needed edits or corrections to the manuscript, it is assigned to an issue. But it may be months before that issue is published. In order to make the research available sooner, a “First Posting” version of the article is added to APA PsycArticles. It will reach “full publication” status between 1 month and 1 year later, when the issue is published.

What if something changes between the OFP’s release and the full publication?

Any record, OFP or not, can be corrected and have a replacement version released in APA PsycArticles. These corrected records are added twice weekly, at the same time as new records.

Continue reading →

Webinar Alert: APA Style CENTRAL® Trainings for May 2017

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Faculty, For Librarians, For Students

APA Style CENTRAL® is the newest member of the APA Style® family, launched in July 2016.

APA’s training specialists have developed several webinars for librarians, instructors, and students that include content overview and a live demonstration of features.

Click on any session link to register (all times are EDT).

The Online Introduction introduces librarians to the platform:

Teaching with APA Style CENTRAL details how faculty, librarians, and other instructors can use APA Style CENTRAL in teaching APA Style:

Writing Papers in APA Style CENTRAL teaches end users how to create and save papers using APA Style CENTRAL:

For more information, and to see the full schedule, visit the APA Style CENTRAL webinars page.

Webinar Alert: PsycINFO Sessions for Students & Faculty – April 26-28, 2017

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

Our next series of PsycINFO® webinars for students and faculty will run on April 5, April 6, and April 7 from 11 – 11:30 a.m. EDT (UTC−04:00). The sessions may be attended separately, but we encourage those who are interested to take all three, so we offer them on consecutive days:

We will provide information relevant to all search platforms including APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest. The platform demonstrated will be based on the needs of the attendees of each session. For more information on this series, including full descriptions, please visit our database webinar training web page.

These webinars are an ideal way for students to get a refresher on PsycINFO if they have had a previous training session. Please help us spread the word to interested students and faculty!

APA PsycTests – Reliability, Validity & Factor Analysis

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

If you’re planning to cite or reuse a test you find in APA PsycTests®, you’ll want to check the reliability, validity, and factor analysis to make sure it suits your research.

Reliability is the ability of a test to measure an attribute consistently. If a group of people takes a personality test and many of them get different results from one day to the next, the test has low reliability.

Validity is the degree to which a test reflects what it is supposed to measure. If a test that is supposed to measure general intelligence actually measures the ability to recall classic literature, the test has low validity.

Factor Analysis is a mathematical procedure that reduces a set of interrelations among variables to a smaller set of variables. For example, a sociology survey might start with six factors of wealth (income, education, occupation, home value, parks in neighborhood, and crime in neighborhood) and, using statistical correlations, reduce them to just two factors: individual socioeconomic status and neighborhood socioeconomic status.

These three psychometric fields can be found in the Test Development Record. The Test Development Record provides details from the original article that discusses the development of the test. This information should help you determine if this test will fit your needs. (Note that if the authors do not report this information in the original article, then it will not be provided in the APA PsycTests record.)

Some tests will also have Test Use and Test Review records. Each APA PsycTests record pulls information from a different research article, so the reliability, validity, and factor analysis can be different from record to record, even if they describe the same test. View a sample APA PsycTests record to see where these fields are located within the record and the data they might contain.

If you need to find the full text of the original article, look in the Reported In or Source field. If you’re having trouble finding full-text for the original article, ask your librarian.

When choosing a test for reuse, don’t forget to check permissions!