From the Deck of… ALA Midwinter 2018

Welcome to “From the Deck of . . .” an irregular series in which we highlight search demos and other information from the slide decks we create for our live training sessions. You can view and download these materials from the PsycINFO SlideShare account.

At the recent American Library Association Midwinter conference, APA hosted a Lunch & Learn training session, which covered searchable vocabularies in PsycINFO®.

  • Keywords are searched using natural language, and are good for current research and new concepts.
  • Index Terms (also called Subject Headings) are found in the thesaurus tool, and help the focused researcher quickly find all records about a concept.
  • PsycINFO Classification Codes® describe broad areas of psychology, and are good to pair with a keyword or an index term search.
  • MeSH, or Medical Subject Headings, are assigned by National Library of Medicine, and are good for searching neuroscience and health topics, especially for researchers familiar with PubMed.

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APA PsycInfo Expert Tip: Online First Publications

What is an Online First Publication?

Online First Publication, also called OFP or First Posting, is a publication status that you may see for journal articles in the APA PsycArticles® database. It means that an article has been published online ahead of its journal issue. You can think of it like an artist’s single that premiers ahead of the full album.

How does this early publishing work?

Most scholarly journals release new issues once every month or once every quarter. When an article has been accepted for publication, and the author and publisher have completed any needed edits or corrections to the manuscript, it is assigned to an issue. But it may be months before that issue is published. In order to make the research available sooner, a “First Posting” version of the article is added to APA PsycArticles. It will reach “full publication” status between 1 month and 1 year later, when the issue is published.

What if something changes between the OFP’s release and the full publication?

Any record, OFP or not, can be corrected and have a replacement version released in APA PsycArticles. These corrected records are added twice weekly, at the same time as new records.

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