Webinar Alert: APA Style CENTRAL® Trainings for May 2017

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

APA Style CENTRAL® is the newest member of the APA Style® family, launched in July 2016.

APA’s training specialists have developed several webinars for librarians, instructors, and students that include content overview and a live demonstration of features.

Click on any session link to register (all times are EDT).

The Online Introduction introduces librarians to the platform:

Teaching with APA Style CENTRAL details how faculty, librarians, and other instructors can use APA Style CENTRAL in teaching APA Style:

Writing Papers in APA Style CENTRAL teaches end users how to create and save papers using APA Style CENTRAL:

For more information, and to see the full schedule, visit the APA Style CENTRAL webinars page.

Webinar Alert: Exploring PsycTESTS

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Librarians

Do you need a refresher on PsycTESTS®? Are you curious what our collection of tests & measures has to offer your users? Join us for a webinar!

The Exploring PsycTESTS webinar will help you:

  • Understand the structure of PsycTESTS records, including master records and child records, and how they are similar to and different from PsycINFO records
  • Locate full-text PDFs, supporting documentation, PsycINFO source documents, and author contact info
  • Use fields and limits to find tests to suit the needs of undergrad assignments, in depth research, and practicing clinicians or counselors.

We offer 30 minute sessions designed for librarians, with an overview of the PsycTESTS record structure followed by a live search demo on your platform.

Exploring PsycTESTS : APA PsycNET Tuesday, May 9, 2017 2 p.m.
Exploring PsycTESTS : EBSCOhost Friday, May 12, 2017 11:30 a.m.
Exploring PsycTESTS : Ovid Wednesday, May 17, 2017 11:00 a.m.
Exploring PsycTESTS : ProQuest Thursday, May 18, 2017 noon

 

All times are Eastern Time.

 

For information on these and other trainings: http://bit.ly/APAwebinars.

 

Can’t make the time scheduled for your platform above? Look for the recorded webinar to be added to the PsycINFO YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/PsycINFO

 

Webinar Alert: PsycINFO Sessions for Students & Faculty – April 26-28, 2017

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

Our next series of PsycINFO® webinars for students and faculty will run on April 5, April 6, and April 7 from 11 – 11:30 a.m. EDT (UTC−04:00). The sessions may be attended separately, but we encourage those who are interested to take all three, so we offer them on consecutive days:

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

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!

New in PsycBOOKS: March 2017

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Librarians

In March 2017, APA added 3 new APA books to PsycBOOKS®:

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.

View the past monthly PsycBOOKS update lists, a list of sample PsycBOOKS titles, and the full coverage list for PsycBOOKS.

APA PsycTests – Reliability, Validity & Factor Analysis

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

If you’re planning to cite or reuse a test you find in APA PsycTests®, you’ll want to check the reliability, validity, and factor analysis to make sure it suits your research.

Reliability is the ability of a test to measure an attribute consistently. If a group of people takes a personality test and many of them get different results from one day to the next, the test has low reliability.

Validity is the degree to which a test reflects what it is supposed to measure. If a test that is supposed to measure general intelligence actually measures the ability to recall classic literature, the test has low validity.

Factor Analysis is a mathematical procedure that reduces a set of interrelations among variables to a smaller set of variables. For example, a sociology survey might start with six factors of wealth (income, education, occupation, home value, parks in neighborhood, and crime in neighborhood) and, using statistical correlations, reduce them to just two factors: individual socioeconomic status and neighborhood socioeconomic status.

These three psychometric fields can be found in the Test Development Record. The Test Development Record provides details from the original article that discusses the development of the test. This information should help you determine if this test will fit your needs. (Note that if the authors do not report this information in the original article, then it will not be provided in the APA PsycTests record.)

Some tests will also have Test Use and Test Review records. Each APA PsycTests record pulls information from a different research article, so the reliability, validity, and factor analysis can be different from record to record, even if they describe the same test. View a sample APA PsycTests record to see where these fields are located within the record and the data they might contain.

If you need to find the full text of the original article, look in the Reported In or Source field. If you’re having trouble finding full-text for the original article, ask your librarian.

When choosing a test for reuse, don’t forget to check permissions!