APA Sunrise Seminar at Mosaic ’16

Posted on April 27, 2016April 20, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Librarians

Do you need to brush up your search skills in the behavioral aspect of health and medicine? Do you find yourself answering an increasing number of questions about APA Style®? Come to the American Psychological Association’s Sunrise Seminar at Mosaic ’16 (the joint meeting of the Medical Library Association, the Canadian Health Libraries Association, and the International Clinical Librarian Conference) and leave with some new tricks to keep up your sleeve!

American Psychological Association Sunrise Seminar
Monday, May 16, 2016
7:00 – 8:45 a.m.
Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Room 202D

Breakfast will be provided – please RSVP so there’s enough to go around.

Live searches on APA databases will review our December 2015 update to the PsycINFO® Thesaurus, and look at some new publications that can support clinical research and practice. Search demos and additional updates will focus on topics relevant to clinical practice, patient education, and health sciences research.

This presentation will also include a sneak peek at APA Style® CENTRAL, a new online resource to learn, research, write and publish in APA Style. You’ll get a look at the learning objects created by our Style Experts, as well as its robust online editor, which has been designed to help students, and others, apply the rules of APA Style while they write. And of course, we’ll also see how APA Style CENTRAL supports users in creating properly formatted APA Style references!

We hope to see you there! If you won’t be at Mosaic ’16, we’ll be reprising this session as a webinar the week after the conference. Visit our webinars schedule to learn more.

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 →

New in PsycBOOKS: March 2016

Posted on April 19, 2016March 28, 2016 by Customer Relations Staff in For Librarians

In March 2016, APA added 4 new APA books and 1 landmark title 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 →

Have You Looked at a PsycINFO Topic Guide Recently?

Posted on April 15, 2016April 1, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Librarians

Sample searches from the Management Topic Guide.

Librarians know that PsycINFO® is a wealth of information not just for psychology, but for many other topics as well. After all, our behavior impacts everything we do, so there is an aspect of behavioral science to nearly every discipline.

Students, however, are often unaware of this and think of PsycINFO, and other APA databases, as only covering topics in psychology.

Topic Guides are an instructional aid designed to help make the case as to why a student in a health sciences, education, or management class should consider searching PsycINFO.

At this time, 20 different interdisciplinary Topic Guides are available on our website. Each contains three sample search scenarios, and a list of selected Index Terms. This helps students get a sense of the way in which behavioral scientists engage with these disciplines, and the language to use to find that information in PsycINFO. Continue reading →

Find the Answers to Your APA Style Questions

Posted on April 12, 2016April 18, 2016 by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Librarians, For Students

As the semester draws to a close, students may begin to find that they have questions about the intricacies of APA Style®. Some can be easily answered by referring to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, or one of our other style guides, but what about the trickier questions?

APA’s Style Experts are here to help! On www.apastyle.org, you can find a variety of resources, including Frequently Asked Questions and a tutorial on The Basics of APA Style.

You can also visit the APA Style Blog, where Style Experts address some of the most common, and most interesting, questions that they receive from students, librarians, and authors.

You’ll find posts covering how to cite the video of a TED Talk, use of “they” as a pronoun, dealing with DOIs, citing online maps, and more. Just use the search box at the top right to see if a Style Expert has already answered your question.

If not, you can submit your question via email to styleexpert@apastyle.org. Please note that if you’re on a tight deadline, they may not be able to get back to you in time. If your question is regarding how to cite something that you can’t find an example of, this post can help!

Style Experts also monitor social media for questions and comments. You can find them online at:

Related Resources:

Learn more about APA Style® CENTRAL, a suite of services and tools designed to ease the pain points encountered by students, instructors and librarians in teaching, learning, and applying APA Style. APA Style CENTRAL will launch this spring. To learn more and sign up for updates, visit www.apastyle.org/asc