Tag: search tips

PsycINFO Expert Tip: Searching by Date on APA PsycNET

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

PsycINFO® records have several date fields that provide information about the creation of the scholarly work and information about the creation of the PsycINFO record in the APA database. In this post, we’ll explain what these different dates mean and how you can use them in your search.

What do all these different dates mean?

The Publication Date is the date that the journal article or book chapter was delivered or made available to customers or subscribers. For journal articles, you may also see Publication History dates –  First Submitted, Revised, and First Posting.

The Release Date is the date that the record was added to the PsycINFO database. You may also see a Correction Date in some records that were updated after the release date.

Usually, the publication date is only a few weeks before the release date on PsycINFO. But sometimes, material published at an earlier date, such as older issues of a journal, will be added to PsycINFO. 

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PsycINFO Expert Tip: Search Alerts & PsycALERTS

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Librarians

If you’re working on a long-term research project, one of your first steps may be a review of the literature. You’ll spend some time picking your best search terms, creating a search query, and identifying journals that are a close fit with your topic. As you move into the data gathering and writing stages, you’ll still want to keep an eye on new publications in your area.

Or if you are an instructor or practitioner, even though your formal schooling is completed, you want to make sure you continue learning about new discoveries in your field of expertise.

Setting up a search alert helps you efficiently keep up with scholarly publications that meet your criteria as they are added to PsycINFO®. There are three types of search alerts you can set up on APA PsycNET®: Topic Alerts, Citation Alerts, and New Publication Alerts. Together, these are called PsycALERTS®.

This post explains in detail how PsycALERTS work on APA PsycNET. If you access PsycINFO® on EBSCOhost, ProQuest, or Ovid, these platforms have free personal accounts and search alert tools that serve the same purpose. It’s best to get the alerts from the same platform that you use to access PsycINFO, so you can easily find the full-text at your institution.

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From the Deck of … MLA ’18 Sunrise Seminar

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Librarians

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 Medical Library Association Annual Meeting earlier this month, we presented a Sunrise Seminar training session. This session focused on searchable fields in PsycINFO® that are especially relevant to medical & health fields, including:

  • first postings
  • NLM Title abbreviation
  • PMID
  • MeSH
  • grants / sponsorships
  • methodology

We also demonstrated how the APA Style CENTRAL® Writing Center can assist with teaching or writing your own meta-analysis, including:

  • choosing a paper template
  • managing the reference list
  • creating and importing tables


You can review the slides from our MLA 2018 Sunrise Seminar on our SlideShare account.

You can also view just the slides about APA Style CENTRAL.

 

Related Resources:

Blog post – Online First Publications
Blog post – What’s a PMID?
Blog post – Grants & Sponsorships
Tutorial – The Meta-Analysis Template

From the Deck of… ALA Midwinter 2018

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Librarians

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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Tutorial Tuesday: How (and Why) to use the APA Thesaurus on APA PsycNET

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

It’s Tutorial Tuesday! In this series, we explore APA’s library of video tutorials available on the PsycINFO® YouTube channel and the APA Style CENTRAL® 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.

We recently updated one of our tutorials: How (and Why) to Use the APA Thesaurus on APA PsycNET®.""

How can you be sure you are finding the best results for your search?

By using the best search terms! The APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms (“APA Thesaurus”) contains the controlled vocabulary that APA uses to describe and categorize all content indexed in PsycINFO. This resource is regularly updated to include new and changing terminology for topics in the behavioral sciences, and you can put it to work for you!

Using the APA Thesaurus helps you eliminate “noise” from your search and retrieve the most relevant results by revealing the best search terms for your topic. The APA Thesaurus is a valuable tool for students new to research or any researcher who is new to a topic area and may not yet know the best terminology for searching.

This brief video (2:40 minutes) demonstrates the benefits of using the APA Thesaurus when searching databases on the APA PsycNET platform, and includes:

  • Examples of recent terminology updates to the APA Thesaurus;
  • How to access the APA Thesaurus when crafting a search;
  • Using the APA Thesaurus to find related terms for narrowing or expanding your search;
  • Discovering index terms for broader concepts that encompass your research topic and make searching more efficient; and
  • Uncovering additional search terms you may not have considered.

This tutorial is a great resource to link from a LibGuide or course module for any class working with APA Databases on APA PsycNET, and can be helpful in answering email or chat reference questions.

The previous version of this tutorial will remain available, but if you have embedded or linked to it anywhere, we encourage you to update your materials with the link to this new version.

Related Resources: