Category: For Individual Subscribers

New Handbook: The APA Handbook of Community Psychology

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

The APA Handbooks in Psychology series was launched in 2011 to provide comprehensive overviews and in-depth study of specific subfields within psychology. All of the Handbooks are included in the PsycBOOKS® database, and titles are also available individually.

The series currently contains 21 authoritative titles, including the 2014 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology.

Cover image of the APA Handbook of Community PsychologyThe most recent addition to the series, the APA Handbook of Community Psychology, was published in September 2016. This two-volume set highlights community psychology’s emphasis on the synergistic relationship between research and action, and offers an international outlook, including chapters integrating perspectives from across cultures and contexts around the world. For more information, including a full table of contents, please visit the APA website.

PsycBOOKS users on APA PsycNET® (including subscribers to APA PsycNET Gold, Gold Plus, and Platinum), EBSCOhost, Ovid and ProQuest can access the entire series by browsing PsycBOOKS or by performing a title search for a particular handbook.

Institutions also have the option of purchasing handbooks individually. Print only, Electronic only, or Electronic + Print options are available through APA, with electronic access provided via the APA PsycNET® platform. For more information on pricing and availability, please see the APA website or contact us at quotes@apa.org.

Introducing New Features in PsycINFO: Starting Your Research on APA PsycNET

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

In August, PsycINFO added new fields and features to help researchers like you search with greater precision and to include more information right in the record.
Because of the interlinking of APA’s products, PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, and PsycCRITIQUES also include these updates.

Four of the new fields are particularly useful as you begin a research project or assignment. They can help you quickly narrow down search results and spot more information about the topic and why it is important.

  • Impact Statement – A summary like an abstract, but instead of describing the technical process, it explains the relevance of the research to the general public. This can help to justify a research project, especially if you are applying for a grant.
  • Open Access – A flag on the record indicates that the fulltext is available through open access. This provides access to resources beyond PsycINFO.
  • Data Sets – A description of the data set is provided, as well as links for access or download when available. Looking at the data yourself enables you to better understand the research conducted in the published study, and to identify your own project that builds on this previous work.
  • Dissertation Details – Advisor(s), Degree, Institution and Department are included in the PsycINFO record. This helps you to find leaders in evolving areas of research, or note other disciplines that are working on similar topics.

 

Check out our SlideShare presentation for a guide on using these new fields on APA PsycNET.

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If you access PsycINFO through a different database platform, you can check the Vendor Status page to see when these new features will go live.

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.