PsycINFO Expert Tip: Finding the Tests in PsycINFO

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

Have you ever needed to find a psychological test? It can be a surprisingly difficult task! Many of the tests you may know by name, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, are commercial tests. This means those who are interested in using them must pay a fee, and may also need to meet other criteria. If you’re a student who needs a test to review for a class, or if you’re researching how to create an effective psychological measure, you’ll need to find non-commercial tests.

You can, of course, find these types of tests in PsycTESTS®, our database of psychological tests and measures. This database contains information about, and excerpts from, more than 34,000 tests in the behavioral sciences. But what if you don’t have access to PsycTESTS?

Try PsycINFO®! You probably know PsycINFO as a database of journal articles from publishers around the world. PsycINFO doesn’t contain any full-text, but each article included is represented by a record, which has been extensively tagged by APA’s indexers. This information allows you to assess how useful the article may be before you try to find the full text. Continue reading →

New in PsycBOOKS: March 2016

Posted on by Customer Relations Staff in For Librarians

In March 2016, APA added 4 new APA books and 1 landmark title in psychology to PsycBOOKS®. Past monthly update lists are available online. You can also view a list of sample titles or a full coverage list.

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. Continue reading →

Have You Looked at a PsycINFO Topic Guide Recently?

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Librarians
Sample searches from the Management Topic Guide.

Sample searches from the Management Topic Guide.

Librarians know that PsycINFO® is a wealth of information not just for psychology, but for many other topics as well. After all, our behavior impacts everything we do, so there is an aspect of behavioral science to nearly every discipline.

Students, however, are often unaware of this and think of PsycINFO, and other APA databases, as only covering topics in psychology.

Topic Guides are an instructional aid designed to help make the case as to why a student in a health sciences, education, or management class should consider searching PsycINFO.

At this time, 20 different interdisciplinary Topic Guides are available on our website. Each contains three sample search scenarios, and a list of selected Index Terms. This helps students get a sense of the way in which behavioral scientists engage with these disciplines, and the language to use to find that information in PsycINFO. Continue reading →

Find the Answers to Your APA Style Questions

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

As the semester draws to a close, students may begin to find that they have questions about the intricacies of APA Style®. Some can be easily answered by referring to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, or one of our other style guides, but what about the trickier questions?

APA’s Style Experts are here to help! On www.apastyle.org, you can find a variety of resources, including Frequently Asked Questions and a tutorial on The Basics of APA Style.

You can also visit the APA Style Blog, where Style Experts address some of the most common, and most interesting, questions that they receive from students, librarians, and authors.

Screenshot of the APA Style Blog

You’ll find posts covering how to cite the video of a TED Talk, use of “they” as a pronoun, dealing with DOIs, citing online maps, and more. Just use the search box at the top right to see if a Style Expert has already answered your question.

If not, you can submit your question via email to styleexpert@apastyle.org. Please note that if you’re on a tight deadline, they may not be able to get back to you in time. If your question is regarding how to cite something that you can’t find an example of, this post can help!

Style Experts also monitor social media for questions and comments. You can find them online at:

Related Resources:

Learn more about APA Style® CENTRAL, a suite of services and tools designed to ease the pain points encountered by students, instructors and librarians in teaching, learning, and applying APA Style. APA Style CENTRAL will launch this spring. To learn more and sign up for updates, visit www.apastyle.org/asc

 

Tutorial Thursday: How to Find DOIs in APA PsycINFO

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

When we look at the most frequently watched videos on the PsycINFO® YouTube channel, there’s one video that’s always in the top ten most-watched tutorials: “How to Find DOIs in APA PsycINFO.”

Screenshot of How to Find DOIs in APA PsycINFO tutorial.

The tutorial defines Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and explores how to find them in PsycINFO on the APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest platforms. It also points out where to look for them on full-text PDFs, and demonstrates CrossRef’s DOI lookup tool.

Since DOIs figure prominently in properly formatted APA Style® references, this video has been linked from our APA Style help resources, and from many library and writing center webpages as well. It’s a popular video that’s been watched more than 89,000 times since it was uploaded in November 2009.

Six years is a long time in the life of a tutorial like this one, and earlier this year we decided it was time to refresh this video. You can find the new version of this tutorial on the PsycINFO YouTube channel, and we’re working to update links on the APA websites.

The old version won’t appear when you visit our YouTube Channel, but we haven’t deleted it, so links to it will still work. We can’t automatically direct users to the updated version, but we’ve edited the video title and description to point users to the new version. If you’ve embedded this tutorial in a webpage and would like to update it, simply follow any link from this post to the new version.

Related Resources: