Using APA PsycInfo Classification Codes on EBSCO

It’s Tutorial Thursday! In this series, we explore APA’s library of video tutorials available on the APA Publishing Training YouTube channel. Please feel free to link to or embed our videos in your library websites or LibGuides, course management systems, or other locations where students, faculty, and researchers will find them.

Classification Codes are used in APA PsycInfo and other APA Databases to broadly categorize the primary subject matter or the main focus of an article, book chapter, or dissertation.

Adding Classification Codes to your query can help limit your search to a particular content theme. They’re a great tool for quickly limiting a large list of search results to better fit your research question, or when a search term can mean different things in different contexts, or different subfields of psychology.

Related Resource

APA Website: List of Classification Codes 

APA PsycNet: How to Export Citations to Citation Management Tools

It’s Tutorial Thursday! In this series, we explore APA’s library of video tutorials available on the APA Publishing Training YouTube channel. Please feel free to link to or embed our videos in your library websites or LibGuides, course management systems, or other locations where students, faculty, and researchers will find them.

In this video you’ll learn How to Export Items from APA PsycNet into Citation Management Tools like RefWorks, EndNote, Mendeley, or Zotero. We’ll start by briefly mentioning the benefits of using a citation management tool. Then, we’ll demonstrate how to export results into EndNote Web and RefWorks. We’ll wrap up the video by showing you how to save results to an .RIS file that can be used with EndNote Desktop, Mendeley, Zotero, and Academic Writer.

By the end of this video you will be able to:

  • Explain the benefits of using a citation management tool
  • Export citations from APA PsycInfo into EndNote Web and RefWorks
  • Generate an .RIS file that can be downloaded and imported into tools such as EndNote Desktop, Mendeley, Zotero, and Academic Writer.

Related Resource
Learning Commons: I need help exporting references from APA PsycNet

Video demo: Academic Writer’s Reference Center

Using APA PsycTests with APA PsycArticles

It’s Tutorial Thursday! In this series, we explore APA’s library of video tutorials available on the APA Publishing Training YouTube channel. Please feel free to link to or embed our videos in your library websites or LibGuides, course management systems, or other locations where students, faculty, and researchers will find them.

APA PsycTests is a collection of descriptive records of psychological tests and measures for the social and behavioral sciences that also integrates seamlessly with APA PsycArticles.

By tagging 30 metadata fields, including reliability, validity, constructs, and usage permissions of over 75,000 measures, APA PsycTests:

  • Eases the burden on researchers to create new tests from scratch.
  • Provides instructors with essential psychometrics examples.
  • Gives students more insight into tests found during their APA PsycArticles research.

Watch this short demonstration of Using APA PsycTests with APA PsycArticles to streamline your research workflow. Our video includes three example searches for how students, instructors, and advanced researchers may use APA PsycTests. 

Related Resources: 

APA PsycTests – Top Features to Know 

Getting Started with APA PsycTests: Search Smarter, Not Harder 

Using APA PsycTests with APA PsycInfo

New Thesaurus Terms for Searching APA PsycInfo (Winter 2022)

APA PsycInfo: The premier abstracting and indexing resource for behavioral and social science research

In January, APA added 44 new terms to its Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms® to provide more effective searching on current topics, including sport and exercise psychology, psychological testing, mental health, and COVID-19. This update, which includes 27 new cross-referenced terms and 22 revised scope notes, brings the total number of index terms in the Thesaurus to more than 10,000.

In order to provide current and accurate search terminology for emerging research, the winter update will be followed by two additional Thesaurus updates in 2022 — one in the spring (May) and another in the fall. New terms from the winter and spring updates will be applied to current content only, but the majority of postable terms new for 2022 will be back-mapped to older records following the fall release.

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New Terms & Other Updates to the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®

We recently released an update to the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. The Thesaurus provides precise and consistent terminology for searching all APA research databases. We added 305 new “preferred” Index Terms and approximately 70 new non-postable or “use” references*.

Each item in the APA databases – journal articles, books and book chapters, dissertations, and more – is represented by a record that is indexed, or tagged, with Index Terms from the Thesaurus. The use of a controlled vocabulary allows someone searching a database to quickly find all items about a specific concept — such as Animal Behavior, Marginalized Groups, or Prescription Drug Misuse — no matter what terminology or keywords the authors used. 

Reflecting emerging areas, technologies, and social issues as well as changing nomenclature, this updated vocabulary will provide users with more targeted and efficient search and discovery. Additionally, we added new terminology in the expanding areas of psychological assessment, psychometrics, and research methods. You can view more details on our web page, What’s New in the 2019 Update, including a link to the full list of new and updated Index Terms (PDF, 135KB).

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