Category: For Students

APA Style CENTRAL – Create a User Account

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

Today we’d like to share an excerpt from one of our APA Style CENTRAL handouts, “Creating APA Style CENTRAL® Accounts” (PDF). Please feel free to link to this handout where students, faculty, and researchers will find it.

When using APA Style CENTRAL, you will need an account in order to write or collaborate on a paper, create a reference list, or use the research planning and tracking tools.

We all have more accounts than we know what to do with (or can remember!), but here’s the good news:  Any existing APA account can also be used as your APA Style CENTRAL account — including a MyAPA, APA membership, APA PsycNET®, or MyPsycNET account.

Not sure if you have an existing APA account to use for APA Style CENTRAL?  Do a quick check by visiting your institution’s APA Style CENTRAL home page. At the top right corner of the screen, select Welcome and Log In; then on the next screen, select the No account? link:

Screenshot of Log In prompts

Enter your email address into the Email field and click anywhere outside the textbox to run the system check. If it matches, you will see a login prompt; if not, you can try entering a different email address or complete the rest of the form to create a new account:

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.

How Permissions Work in PsycTESTS

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

PsycTESTS® is a research database that provides information on tests that originated in the scholarly literature. Tests are mined from the journals currently covered in the PsycINFO database.

PsycTESTS records include citations and links to articles that discuss the development of the test and how it can be used. Each PsycTESTS record includes a Permissions field with information about how the test can be used in your research or clinical work.

Currently, over 24,000 PsycTESTS records (almost 60%) grant the permission “May use for Research / Teaching.”

The test PDF has a cover sheet with a longer description of Research / Teaching use:

Test content may be reproduced and used for non-commercial research and educational purposes without seeking written permission. Distribution must be controlled, meaning only to the participants engaged in the research or enrolled in the educational activity. Any other type of reproduction or distribution of test content is not authorized without written permission from the author and publisher. Always include a credit line that contains the source citation and copyright owner when writing about or using any test.

Examples of permitted use include:

  • Using the test for educational purposes, for example in a school project
  • Publishing the results of research using the test, as well as the test itself, with a copyright notice giving credit to the original test authors
  • General use in a clinical setting

Examples of nonpermitted use include:

  • Posting the test online
  • Implying or stating that the test is your original work
  • Publishing the test or selling the test to a commercial publisher
  • Using the test in research intended to support commercial gain

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APA Style CENTRAL – Accessing the Publication Manual

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

APA Style CENTRAL® incorporates all of the references and content from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, currently in its sixth edition. When future editions of the Publication Manual are released, APA Style CENTRAL will also be updated with the new rules and features.

Within APA Style CENTRAL’s Learning Center, each of the quick guides, or short training videos, is linked to one or more sections from the Publication Manual that cover the same topic.

You can find the link to the Publication Manual in the Learn More feature for each quick guide.

 

 

The Publication Manual section with related content opens in a new window or tab (depending on your browser settings):

 

 

 

For more information, see our Handout about APA Style CENTRAL and the Publication Manual.

Setting up a PsycTESTS Search

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

topPsycTESTS® is a research database that provides information on tests mined from the scholarly literature in PsycINFO®. Nearly 40,000 unique tests are represented in PsycTESTS, organized into 15 instrument types and 30 classifications.

There are a number of ways to search for a test, including the author name, keywords, test name, or test construct. (A construct is the concept the test is measuring, such as Confidence or Anxiety.)

PsycTESTS also includes limits, or controlled lists of values, that can be set before you run the search, toward the bottom of the advanced search page, or after you run the search, along the side of the search results page. These limits include:

  • Administration Method – how the test is given to participants, such as Paper or Interview.
  • Fee – indicates whether or not there is a fee for test use.
  • Instrument Type – the primary testing category of the instrument, such as Checklist or Task.
  • Permissions – the level of permissions needed in order to use a test. The Permissions statement may grant use for non-commercial research and teaching, or it may specify who to contact to obtain these permissions.
  • Supporting Documentation – supporting documentation types, such as instructor guide or answer sheet.

These next three limits may seem familiar from PsycINFO:

  • Age Group – specific population age groups that were the focus of the test.
  • Population Group – populations to which the test was administered. Possible values are Human, Animal, Male, Female, Inpatient and Outpatient.
  • PsycTESTS Classification – the general area of psychology that the measure is designed to assess, such as Human-Computer Interaction or Personality. (The PsycTESTS Classification system was created using the same principles behind the PsycINFO Classification Codes, but the codes and descriptors are different for these databases.)

There is also a Full Text Test Available checkbox that limits your search to records that have the PDF of the test attached to the descriptive record.

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Opening a record from the search results takes you to the Test Master Record, which provides a profile and descriptive summary of the test.

Test Master Records have one or more Test Child Records that include information related to the test’s development, use, or review.

Child records may be:

  • Test Development: discusses the development of the test. You’ll see this for most of the tests in the database.
  • Test Review: reviews the test – this is available for a small percentage of the tests.
  • Test Use: reports on a new use of the test – for example, a researcher may have taken a test designed for adults and administered it to teenagers. This is also available for a small percentage of tests.

For more detailed information for your platform – APA PsycNET®, EBSCOhost, Ovid or ProQuest – please view our presentation on SlideShare.

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Webinar Alert: PsycINFO Sessions for Students & Faculty November 30-December 2

Posted on by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Librarians, For Students

Our next series of PsycINFO® webinars for students and faculty will run on November 30, December 1, and December 2 from 11 – 11:30 a.m. EST (UTC -5). The sessions may be taken separately, but we encourage those who are interested to take all three, and offer them on consecutive days:

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

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!