Academic Writer is APA’s revolutionary writing platform designed to help students develop long-lasting scholarly writing and research skills. Combining self-paced learning with seamless integration of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), this resource helps students grow and succeed in their academic careers while enabling educators to focus on teaching their curriculum.
To help your academic community maximize institutional access to Academic Writer, we’re excited to share the latest features and resources available in the platform. Read on to learn more and share these updates with your users:
Interested in strengthening your APA database searching skills? Join us for the next round of APA PsycInfo® webinars designed for students, faculty, and anyone else who wants to learn more about how to search APA PsycInfo more effectively!
APA’s expert trainers will lead three different webinars this fall, so you can choose the one that best matches your interest.
Details and registration links are below; all times are in U.S. Eastern.
APA PsycInfo: Beginner Search
This 45 minute session is for anyone who is new to searching the behavioral sciences literature.
APA trainers demonstrate simple yet powerful techniques including how to quickly identify the best search terms, apply filters to narrow the range of results, and pinpoint empirical studies.
Highlights include using APA Thesaurus terms and other database fields to target your search, Boolean operators to accurately include or exclude concepts, and cited references to find related research.
This 60-minute session highlights some of APA PsycInfo’s advanced functionality, designed to increase your efficiency by retrieving better search results faster.
We provide an overview of the three main vocabularies [keywords, Thesaurus subjects, and Classifications] you can use to search APA PsycInfo, and show easy effective ways to quickly expand or narrow your list of search results.
You’ll also learn about syntax for proximity search and truncation; using citations to explore related research; applying search limits and results filters; using the Author Affiliation field to discover where research of interest is happening; searching the Test and Measures field for information about tests used in the scholarly literature; and using the Grant/Sponsorship field to discover potential funding sources.
Every spring and every fall, APA trainers offer a deeper dive into one area of our tools and databases. These hour-long trainings are designed for researchers and librarians who use APA PsycInfo frequently.
A live platform demo will focus on: the extensive content update of June 2023; The APA PsycTherapy Teaching Guide & corresponding APA PsycTherapy playlists; and individual account tools.
APA PsycArticles® has been updated to include an array of special journal issues covering the most up-to-date topics in psychology, including trauma in young adults, racial justice, and traumatic brain injury.
These special issues feature peer-reviewed journal articles from leading researchers, and provide key insights for students, faculty, and practitioners alike searching for the latest scientific literature in their field.
In June, APA added 76 new terms to its Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms® to provide more effective searching on current topics, including therapy and treatment; artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks; and research integrity and ethics. This Thesaurus update also includes 55 new cross-referenced terms and 76 revised scope notes.
New terms from this summer update will initially be applied to current content only; following the fall release, the majority of new postable terms for 2023 will be back-mapped to older records.
New terms in the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms as of June 2023
We are excited to announce that the amount of content in the APA PsycTherapy® database more than doubled on May 30!
Clinical psychology faculty, researchers, and graduate students can now access 910+ videos presenting more than 1,030 unscripted full therapy sessions conducted by expert practitioners with individuals, couples, and families.
APA Teletherapy Video Series titles now available in APA PsycTherapy
This latest update includes the full catalog of the APA PsychotherapyVideo Series in addition to newly published single video titles, such as:
Working With Couples in the Correctional System (Corrine Datchi)
Multicultural Feminist Therapy With Adolescent Girls of Color (Thema Bryant-Davis)
Working With Clients Experiencing Climate Distress (Leslie Davenport and Wendy Greenspun)
Setting standards for nearly 30 years, the APA Psychotherapy Video Series is well known in the field of psychology and includes many best-selling titles. Many videos feature the clinician who created the psychotherapy approach along with framing content, including an interview about their approach and their professional analysis of the therapy demonstration. This provides unique and valuable instructional context to benefit students as part of both coursework and independent study. All future APA Psychotherapy Video Series releases will be included in APA PsycTherapy, totaling 20-40 hours of new streaming video content each year.
APA PsycTherapy includes content related to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), a central principle guiding APA’s organizational mission. To help foster cultural competency and sensitivity, more than 50 titles feature topics related to EDI or feature therapists of color. Examples include:
Working With Clients With Physical Disabilities (Linda Mona)
Affirmative Counseling With Transgender and Gender Diverse Clients (Lore Dickey)
Cultural Humility in Therapy (Cirleen DeBlaere and Jesse Owen)
The Dynamics of Power and Privilege in Psychotherapy (Malin Fors)
Reflections on Race and Ethnicity in the Therapeutic Setting (Rita Chi-Ying Chung, Joseph M. Cervantes, Fred Bemak, and Thema Bryant-Davis)
Ethnocultural Psychotherapy (Lillian Comas-Diaz)
Working With Issues of Social Class in Psychotherapy (William M. Liu)
This powerful teaching resource provides authentic, engaging examples of therapeutic approaches such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based interventions, and trauma-focused therapy. Through firsthand observation, students learn how to translate theoretical concepts into practice and different ways of handling critical incidents that can arise during treatment.
APA PsycTherapy also includes the APA PsycTherapy Teaching Guide to assist faculty with curricula development and training the next generation of expert practitioners. It features exercises for using APA PsycTherapy with students, in clinical supervision settings, in psychotherapy researcher training, and more.
