Webinar Alert: APA Style CENTRAL Trainings for February 2017

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

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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 a content overview as well as a live demonstration of features.

Click on any session link listed below to register (all times are EST).

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.

New in PsycBOOKS: December 2016

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Librarians

In December 2016, 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 Announces Winter 2017 Recipient of the Librarian Conference Travel Award

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Librarians

Photo of Karen N. ReedWe are pleased to announce that Karen N. Reed, Assistant Professor and Education Librarian at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) in Murfreesboro, TN, is the latest recipient of the APA Librarian Conference Travel Award. Karen used the funds to defray the cost of attendance at the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) conference earlier this month.

At MTSU, Karen supports the College of Education, which includes graduate programs in school psychology and professional counseling, and will soon include a Master of Library Science program. Attending ALISE will help Karen prepare for this new program; she hopes to teach a class in the MLS program after completing her Ph.D. in Literacy Studies.

The committee would like to thank all those who took time to apply – we received applications from librarians in a wide variety of institutions and positions. The applicant pool is always strong, and the committee encourages past applicants to apply again when they are next in need of conference funding.

Now through March 31, 2017, the APA Librarian Conference Travel Award is accepting applications for conferences taking place from May to August 2017. Please see the website for more details on eligibility, deadlines, and application materials.

APA PsycInfo Expert Tip: Searching by Keyword, Index Term and More

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

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between a keyword and an index term, and how they can aid your search? What are classification codes, and how does this all relate to MeSH terms? This post will demystify the four types of vocabulary you see in APA PsycInfo®.

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Keywords (also called Key Concepts or Identifiers) – Individual words, key concepts, or brief phrases that describe the document’s content. The list of keywords for an article is often provided by the author or publisher, though sometimes it is created by APA staff. There is no pre-existing list of keywords that authors, publishers, or APA staff choose from.

Keyword searching is a good fit for researchers who are new to a topic, and want to get the full scope of what is available. Keyword searching is most similar to the searching you may do on the internet, because keywords are often in natural language or layman’s terms. In addition, you do not need to select or know terms from a pre-existing list, as you do for the following three types of vocabulary.

Index Terms (also called Subjects or Subject Headings) – Index terms are also single words or brief phrases that describe the document’s content, but they are chosen from a pre-existing list (also called a controlled vocabulary). For the APA databases, that list is the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®, which includes more than 8,400 terms. APA staff typically choose about six index terms for each document. You can use the thesaurus tool, linked from the APA PsycInfo search page, to search or browse index terms alphabetically or by topic.

Index term searching is a good fit for the focused researcher, who has identified their best term(s) and now wants to quickly find all of the items about a particular concept. With the wide variety of concepts and vocabulary used in the psychological literature, searching for and retrieving records about specific concepts is virtually impossible without the controlled vocabulary of a thesaurus. It provides a way of structuring the subject matter in a way that is consistent among users (e.g., searching for Dysphoria, Melancholia, and Depression can all be achieved by searching the term “Major Depression”).

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Webinar Alert: PsycINFO Sessions for Students & Faculty – January 25-27

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

Our next series of PsycINFO® webinars for students and faculty will run on January 25, January, 26 and January 27 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, 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!