PsycINFO Expert Tip: Finding the Tests in PsycINFO

Posted on April 22, 2016April 20, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

Have you ever needed to find a psychological test? It can be a surprisingly difficult task! Many of the tests you may know by name, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, are commercial tests. This means those who are interested in using them must pay a fee, and may also need to meet other criteria. If you’re a student who needs a test to review for a class, or if you’re researching how to create an effective psychological measure, you’ll need to find non-commercial tests.

You can, of course, find these types of tests in PsycTESTS®, our database of psychological tests and measures. This database contains information about, and excerpts from, more than 34,000 tests in the behavioral sciences. But what if you don’t have access to PsycTESTS?

Try PsycINFO®! You probably know PsycINFO as a database of journal articles from publishers around the world. PsycINFO doesn’t contain any full-text, but each article included is represented by a record, which has been extensively tagged by APA’s indexers. This information allows you to assess how useful the article may be before you try to find the full text. Continue reading →

Now Available in PsycARTICLES: The Humanistic Psychologist

Posted on March 22, 2016March 18, 2016 by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians

Three new journals will be added to PsycARTICLES® over the course of 2016. We will provide updates on their availability throughout the year. More information about APA’s journals, including special issues, is available on our website.

We are pleased to announce that full-text back issues for The Humanistic Psychologist are now available back to Volume 13. (Issues 1-12 were the society’s newsletter, and will not be added to PsycARTICLES.) The first APA-published issue will be Volume 44, Issue 1, and is scheduled to release in March.

The journal, which is the official publication of APA Division 32: The Society for Humanistic Psychology, publishes papers on a wide variety of theories, psychotherapies, and perspectives relating to humanistic psychology, as well as papers on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods research. Articles published in 2015 examined topics including the psychological aspects of singing, the ethics of attention, and an exploration of hallucinations as the amplification of negative emotions from a patient’s past.

PsycARTICLES users on APA PsycNET® (including subscribers to APA PsycNET Gold, Gold Plus, and Platinum), EBSCOhost, Ovid and ProQuest can review all available issues by browsing PsycARTICLES or by performing a title search for the journal.

Related Resources:

Learn more about The Humanistic Psychologist, including manuscript submission policies and information about subscribing in print.

Introducing the PsycCRITIQUES Spotlight

Posted on March 18, 2016March 14, 2016 by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

PsycCRITIQUES® is APA’s database of reviews of psychology related books, films, and videos. These reviews are ideal for instructors in need of classroom activities and readings, librarians responsible for collection development, and practitioners looking to keep current.

For several years, the editors of PsycCRITIQUES maintained a blog, where they discussed the topics raised in the books being reviewed. The blog now has a new format – PsycCRITIQUES Spotlight – and a new home with our Highlights in Psychological Research.

In addition to the PsycCRITIQUES Spotlight, our Highlights in Psychological Research include the APA Journals Article Spotlight™ and Particularly Exciting Experiments in Psychology™ (PeePs). These look at the latest research from APA Journals; Article Spotlights through the lens of a single article, and PeePs explore trends in recent publications. Finally, the APA Journals Dialogue podcast connects listeners with authors, who discuss the findings from recent research, and implications for further work.

Highlights in Psychological Research are rich source of information. They’re a useful tool for anyone looking to keep current with new developments in behavioral sciences research. They can also be used by students and instructors when brainstorming topics for assignments, and by librarians who need fresh ideas for search examples.

Related Resources:
Visit the PsycINFO YouTube channel to watch a brief video exploring PsycCRITIQUES.

PsycINFO Expert Tip: Find Items Added to PsycINFO During a Specific Timeframe

Posted on March 10, 2016February 24, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

Recently, we reviewed how to edit a search alert in order to incorporate recent changes to the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®, which was updated in December. In our example, we updated a search that included an Index Term that’s no longer being used to tag records in PsycINFO®: Aspergers Syndrome.

Screenshot of release date on a record on APA PsycNET

This article was added to PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES® on November 2, 2015.

We add records about new articles, book chapters, and dissertations to PsycINFO twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Every item in an APA database includes the specific date it was added to that database. On APA PsycNET®, this is called the Release Date. It’s formatted in year-month-day order, with no spaces, hyphens, or slashes. For example: 20151214 or 20160201.

You can use this information to create a search that will retrieve results that were added to the database in a specific timeframe. With this technique, you can create a search that will find all the records added to PsycINFO from the date that this Index Term was changed, until the date that you changed your search alert.

We have put together a set of slides that demonstrate how to search by the release date on APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid and ProQuest. If you are affiliated with a college or university, you can ask a librarian for assistance with this process. Subscribers to APA PsycNET Gold, Gold Plus, and Platinum packages can contact APA Databases & Electronic Resources Customer Relations at psycinfo@apa.org or 800-374-2722.

Stigma and Health: A New Journal from APA

Posted on March 7, 2016March 4, 2016 by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

Volume 1, Issue 1 of Stigma and Health, a new publication from APA Journals®, is now available. Readers can access this issue, along with the inaugural special issue published in August 2015, electronically via PsycARTICLES®.

Stigma and Health publishes research examining the ways in which stigma impacts people living with mental and physical illness. This includes studies on the form and impact of stigma, methods of decreasing and erasing stigma, and treatment of its effects. Theoretical reviews are also welcome. Volume 1, Issue 1 includes articles examining the stigma around veganism, self-stigma among people living with schizophrenia, and the psychometric evaluation of sexual minorities.

PsycARTICLES users on APA PsycNET® (including subscribers to APA PsycNET Gold, Gold Plus, and Platinum), EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest can review the first issue by browsing PsycARTICLES or by performing a title search for the journal.

Related Resources:

Learn more about Stigma and Health, including manuscript submission policies and information about subscribing in print.