Tag: APA PsycInfo

Introducing New Features in PsycINFO: Starting Your Research on APA PsycNET

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

In August, PsycINFO added new fields and features to help researchers like you search with greater precision and to include more information right in the record.
Because of the interlinking of APA’s products, PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, and PsycCRITIQUES also include these updates.

Four of the new fields are particularly useful as you begin a research project or assignment. They can help you quickly narrow down search results and spot more information about the topic and why it is important.

  • Impact Statement – A summary like an abstract, but instead of describing the technical process, it explains the relevance of the research to the general public. This can help to justify a research project, especially if you are applying for a grant.
  • Open Access – A flag on the record indicates that the fulltext is available through open access. This provides access to resources beyond PsycINFO.
  • Data Sets – A description of the data set is provided, as well as links for access or download when available. Looking at the data yourself enables you to better understand the research conducted in the published study, and to identify your own project that builds on this previous work.
  • Dissertation Details – Advisor(s), Degree, Institution and Department are included in the PsycINFO record. This helps you to find leaders in evolving areas of research, or note other disciplines that are working on similar topics.

 

Check out our SlideShare presentation for a guide on using these new fields on APA PsycNET.

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If you access PsycINFO through a different database platform, you can check the Vendor Status page to see when these new features will go live.

Webinar Alert: PsycINFO Sessions for Students & Faculty October 12-14

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

Our next series of PsycINFO® webinars for students and faculty will run on October 12, 13, and 14 from 11 – 11:30 a.m. EDT (UTC -4). The sessions may be taken separately, but we encourage those who are interested to take all three, and offer them on consecutive days:

We will provide information relevant to all search platforms including APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest. The platform used will be based on the needs of the attendees of each session. For more information on this series, including full descriptions, please visit our website.

These webinars are an ideal way for students to get a refresher on PsycINFO if they have had a previous training session. Please help us spread the word to interested students and faculty!

Webinar Alert: PsycINFO Sessions for Students & Faculty September 28-30

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

Our next series of PsycINFO® webinars for students and faculty will run on September 28, 29, and 30 from 11 – 11:30 a.m. (EDT). The sessions may be taken separately, but we encourage those who are interested to take all three, and offer them on consecutive days:

We will provide information relevant to all search platforms including APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest. The platform used will be based on the needs of the attendees of each session. For more information on this series, including full descriptions, please visit our website.

These webinars are an ideal way for students to get a refresher on PsycINFO if they have had a previous training session. Please help us spread the word to interested students and faculty!

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 →