Category: For Students

PsycINFO Expert Tip: Finding the Tests in PsycINFO

Posted on 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 →

Find the Answers to Your APA Style Questions

Posted on 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.

Screenshot of the APA Style Blog

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

 

Tutorial Thursday: How to Find DOIs in APA PsycINFO

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

When we look at the most frequently watched videos on the PsycINFO® YouTube channel, there’s one video that’s always in the top ten most-watched tutorials: “How to Find DOIs in APA PsycINFO.”

Screenshot of How to Find DOIs in APA PsycINFO tutorial.

The tutorial defines Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and explores how to find them in PsycINFO on the APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest platforms. It also points out where to look for them on full-text PDFs, and demonstrates CrossRef’s DOI lookup tool.

Since DOIs figure prominently in properly formatted APA Style® references, this video has been linked from our APA Style help resources, and from many library and writing center webpages as well. It’s a popular video that’s been watched more than 89,000 times since it was uploaded in November 2009.

Six years is a long time in the life of a tutorial like this one, and earlier this year we decided it was time to refresh this video. You can find the new version of this tutorial on the PsycINFO YouTube channel, and we’re working to update links on the APA websites.

The old version won’t appear when you visit our YouTube Channel, but we haven’t deleted it, so links to it will still work. We can’t automatically direct users to the updated version, but we’ve edited the video title and description to point users to the new version. If you’ve embedded this tutorial in a webpage and would like to update it, simply follow any link from this post to the new version.

Related Resources:

Webinar Alert: PsycINFO Sessions for Students & Faculty April 13-15

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 April 13, 14, and 15 from 11 – 11:30 a.m. (EDT). 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 training earlier in the semester. Please help us spread the word to interested students and faculty!

Introducing the PsycCRITIQUES Spotlight

Posted on 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.

Screenshot of Highlights in Psychological Research webpageFor 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.