Through November 30 – Travel Award Accepting Applications for Spring Conferences

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.

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Tutorial Thursday: Finding Empirical Articles

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

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

Webinar Alert: APA Style CENTRAL Online Introductions for September 2016

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APA Style CENTRAL® is the newest member of the APA Style® family, and launched on July 11.

APA’s training specialists have developed a one-hour introductory session for librarians. This webinar includes a content overview and a live demonstration of features. (Please note that additional training on administrative features, as well as training geared toward students and other users, is currently in development.)

There are five sessions scheduled for September. Click on any session below to register (all times are EDT/UTC -4):

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