APA Announces Fall 2016 Recipient of the Librarian Conference Travel Award

Posted on by Customer Relations Staff in For Librarians

We are pleased to announce that Stacey A. Smith, Public Services Librarian at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, IL, is the latest recipient of the APA Librarian Conference Travel Award. Stacey will use the funds to defray the cost of attendance at the Library Assessment Conference later this fall.

Stacey has been at The Chicago School for about a year and a half, and one of her main projects has been assessing the effectiveness of the school’s growing instruction program. She and her colleagues are trying to build a case for introducing a more systematic program of instruction that is, ideally, embedded into the curriculum. Stacey is hoping to make connections at the conference, and return with new ideas and knowledge to inform their assessment initiative.

The committee would like to thank all those who took time to apply – we were inundated with applications from librarians in a wide variety of institutions and positions.

Now through November 30, 2016, APA Librarian Conference Travel Award is accepting applications for conferences taking place from January to April 2017. Please see the website for more details on eligibility, deadlines, and application materials.

Frequently Asked Questions on APA Style CENTRAL

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

APA Style CENTRAL® is an authoritative resource developed by our Style Experts. It is a suite of services and tools designed to ease the pain points encountered by students, instructors and librarians in teaching, learning, and writing in APA Style. Online Introduction webinars are offered weekly, and are a great way to take a structured tour of all of the tools available in this revolutionary new resource.

Many attendees at these sessions – as well as those who are exploring APA Style CENTRAL on their own, through a free trial for their institution – have the same questions. We have gathered them into two sets of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). A General FAQ suitable for all users, including students and faculty, and an Administrative FAQ intended for librarians.

Screenshot of APA Style CENTRAL webpage with FAQs.

Both of these FAQs are available on the APA Style CENTRAL website. When reviewing these FAQs, don’t miss the extended versions! These are available as PDFs linked at the top of the webpage.

If your question isn’t answered in the FAQs, or if you’d like more details, please contact us at support@apastylecentral.org.

Through November 30 – Travel Award Accepting Applications for Spring Conferences

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Librarians

Do you work in an academic or health sciences library in the United States? Are you an early- or mid-career librarian? Are you looking for sources of funding for a conference you’d like to attend this fall?

If the answer to all of those questions is yes, please consider applying for an APA Librarian Conference Travel Award! Through November 30, 2016, we are accepting applications for conferences taking place from January to April 2017.

The award is intended to help defray conference-related expenses for librarians with less than 15 years of experience after receiving their MLS. Three cash awards are distributed three times each calendar year, and the application cycle opens and closes on a rolling basis. At this time, we are not limiting the conferences that are eligible for travel award funding. Applicants should identify the conference that best meets their professional needs, and explain how attendance will support their current duties and future goals.

Continue reading →

Tutorial Thursday: Finding Empirical Articles

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, 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.

The start of any semester brings new students to campus, but fall semester in particular brings with it a wave of students who may find themselves working with new and unfamiliar research tools and terminology.

How to identify and locate peer-reviewed articles is a common question at most academic library reference desks. For some social science classes, students must empirical studies that have been peer-reviewed. To aid students and others who need assistance with – or a refresher on – using PsycINFO® to locate this type of information, we have a brief tutorial on finding peer-reviewed, empirical articles. Continue reading →

New Features Added to PsycINFO

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

PsycINFO® is APA’s flagship research database, providing access to records for journal articles, books, chapters, dissertations, and other scholarly psychological content, with extensive global and historical coverage, and full cited references.

APA strives to keep PsycINFO useful and relevant. This means that, every so often, we need to add a new field to the database. (In this context, a field provides a specific type of information about the article being described – age group of the participants, for example, or the methodology used.) This allows us to provide researchers and users in the behavioral sciences and related disciplines with improved usability and new tools to help retrieve content and conduct their research.

We bundle these changes together and add them all at once, in what we refer to as a “reload” or “refresh” of the database. On August 1, we released a refresh of PsycINFO that includes several new features. These new features are already available on APA PsycNET® and EBSCOhost; Ovid and ProQuest are working on uploading the changes. Our vendor partners implement reloads on different schedules, so check with your vendor or visit our Vendor Reload Status Update page for more information.

In the coming weeks, we will be providing more in-depth information on how these fields and features work, and where to find them as you search PsycINFO. We will also be offering webinars to demonstrate the features live. We’ll announce the schedule here as soon as it’s ready! Continue reading →