Tutorial Thursday & Translated Topic Guides

Posted on June 23, 2016June 16, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Librarians

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.

Are you familiar with our Topic Guides?

Sample searches from the Management Topic Guide.

These brief interdisciplinary handouts are designed to demonstrate how PsycINFO can be used to search for resources in a variety of topic areas. They contain three sample search scenarios, and a list of selected Index Terms.

We’ve created video tutorials based on the Feminism, Management, and Nursing Topic Guides. The videos walk through each of the three sample searches from the guide, demonstrating how to create the searches using the Thesaurus. For each tutorial, you’ll find a version for the APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid, and ProQuest platforms. We’ve gathered them all together into a playlist on our YouTube channel.

A screenshot from the APA PsycNET version of the video tutorial for the Management Topic Guide.

In addition to creating these tutorials, we recently translated all 20 Topic Guides into 8 languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish..

The Spanish version of the Grief & Trauma Topic Guide.

You’ll find the translations linked at the bottom of the Topic Guides webpage.

Related Resources:

Topic Guides pair well with our PsycINFO Quick Reference Guides, which walk the user through searching some of the fundamental fields in PsycINFO, such as Index Term/Subject Heading, Title, Author Name, and more.

• Quick Reference Guide for PsycINFO on APA PsycNET
• Quick Reference Guide for PsycINFO on EBSCOhost
• Quick Reference Guide for PsycINFO on ProQuest
• Quick Reference Guide for PsycINFO on Ovid

Please note that print copies of Quick Reference Guides are available to libraries upon request, free of charge. Send a message to psycinfo@apa.org and let us know which guide you’d like, how many, and where to send them.

In Case You Missed It: PsycINFO Quick Reference Guides

Posted on June 15, 2016June 13, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

Have you looked at our PsycINFO® Quick Reference Guides lately? Many librarians know and love these compact handouts, which use a series of screenshots and captions to reinforce foundational PsycINFO search techniques.

PsycINFO Quick Reference Guide - Keywords panel

An excerpt from the PsycINFO Quick Reference Guide for APA PsycNET(R). This demonstrates how to perform a Keyword search.

Available for PsycINFO on APA PsycNET®, EBSCOhost, ProQuest, and Ovid, the guides cover search basics such as formatting an author search, finding for a journal by title, using the Index Terms or Subjects, and more.

PsycINFO Quick Reference Guides are available as PDFs to easily share via email, or link on your LibGuides, course modules, and other resources.

Librarians can also request a quantity of print guides, which APA will ship free of charge! The print guides are formatted into small, accordion-fold handouts – easy to tuck into a bookbag, satchel, or purse for convenient reference no matter where or when you’re searching PsycINFO.

To make a request, please contact us at psycinfo@apa.org. Be sure to include your mailing address, the number of guides you’d like, and indicate which platform you use to access PsycINFO.

Download or link to the PsycINFO Quick Reference Guide PDF for:

PsycINFO Expert Tip: Finding the Tests in PsycINFO

Posted on April 22, 2016April 20, 2016 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 →

PsycINFO Expert Tip: Find Items Added to PsycINFO During a Specific Timeframe

Posted on March 10, 2016February 24, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

Recently, we reviewed how to edit a search alert in order to incorporate recent changes to the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®, which was updated in December. In our example, we updated a search that included an Index Term that’s no longer being used to tag records in PsycINFO®: Aspergers Syndrome.

Screenshot of release date on a record on APA PsycNET

This article was added to PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES® on November 2, 2015.

We add records about new articles, book chapters, and dissertations to PsycINFO twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Every item in an APA database includes the specific date it was added to that database. On APA PsycNET®, this is called the Release Date. It’s formatted in year-month-day order, with no spaces, hyphens, or slashes. For example: 20151214 or 20160201.

You can use this information to create a search that will retrieve results that were added to the database in a specific timeframe. With this technique, you can create a search that will find all the records added to PsycINFO from the date that this Index Term was changed, until the date that you changed your search alert.

We have put together a set of slides that demonstrate how to search by the release date on APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid and ProQuest. If you are affiliated with a college or university, you can ask a librarian for assistance with this process. Subscribers to APA PsycNET Gold, Gold Plus, and Platinum packages can contact APA Databases & Electronic Resources Customer Relations at psycinfo@apa.org or 800-374-2722.

PsycINFO Expert Tip: Updating Search Alerts When a Thesaurus Term Changes

Posted on March 1, 2016March 29, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

The Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®, which is used to tag and categorize records in PsycINFO®, was updated in December 2015. In addition to adding terms, we changed five terms that had already been a part of the Thesaurus – they are no longer Index Terms, but have been turned into Use references.

Here are the terms that were changed, along with the new Index Terms that have taken their places:

*Terms that are now Use* references**	New Index Terms to search
Aspergers Syndrome Autism Pervasive Developmental Disorders	Autism Spectrum Disorders
Complications (Disorders)	Sequelae
Q Sort Testing Technique	Q-Sort

Continue reading →