Setting up a PsycTESTS Search

Posted on December 2, 2016December 1, 2016 by Marta Soto in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

PsycTESTS® is a research database that provides information on tests mined from the scholarly literature in PsycINFO®. Nearly 40,000 unique tests are represented in PsycTESTS, organized into 15 instrument types and 30 classifications.

There are a number of ways to search for a test, including the author name, keywords, test name, or test construct. (A construct is the concept the test is measuring, such as Confidence or Anxiety.)

PsycTESTS also includes limits, or controlled lists of values, that can be set before you run the search, toward the bottom of the advanced search page, or after you run the search, along the side of the search results page. These limits include:

Administration Method – how the test is given to participants, such as Paper or Interview.
Fee – indicates whether or not there is a fee for test use.
Instrument Type – the primary testing category of the instrument, such as Checklist or Task.
Permissions – the level of permissions needed in order to use a test. The Permissions statement may grant use for non-commercial research and teaching, or it may specify who to contact to obtain these permissions.
Supporting Documentation – supporting documentation types, such as instructor guide or answer sheet.

These next three limits may seem familiar from PsycINFO:

Age Group – specific population age groups that were the focus of the test.
Population Group – populations to which the test was administered. Possible values are Human, Animal, Male, Female, Inpatient and Outpatient.
PsycTESTS Classification – the general area of psychology that the measure is designed to assess, such as Human-Computer Interaction or Personality. (The PsycTESTS Classification system was created using the same principles behind the PsycINFO Classification Codes, but the codes and descriptors are different for these databases.)

There is also a Full Text Test Available checkbox that limits your search to records that have the PDF of the test attached to the descriptive record.

Opening a record from the search results takes you to the Test Master Record, which provides a profile and descriptive summary of the test.

Test Master Records have one or more Test Child Records that include information related to the test’s development, use, or review.

Child records may be:

Test Development: discusses the development of the test. You’ll see this for most of the tests in the database.
Test Review: reviews the test – this is available for a small percentage of the tests.
Test Use: reports on a new use of the test – for example, a researcher may have taken a test designed for adults and administered it to teenagers. This is also available for a small percentage of tests.

For more detailed information for your platform – APA PsycNET®, EBSCOhost, Ovid or ProQuest – please view our presentation on SlideShare.

Searching Many Terms at Once on PsycINFO

Posted on November 10, 2016November 7, 2016 by Marta Soto in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

When you begin a review of the literature, it’s important to construct a successful search query that harnesses all the research on the topic. One way to do this is to search for synonyms and related concepts at the same time.

First, list the concepts that you are researching. This can be done with pen and paper. For example, I want to learn more about ADHD in teenagers, particularly at school.

Next, brainstorm alternate terms for each of your concepts. ADHD could also be called: ADD, hyperactivity, or attention deficit disorder. Teenagers could also be called: adolescents, teens, or high schoolers. School could also be called: education, classroom, class, academic, or learning.

Keep the terms you brainstorm for each concept together in their own group – we’ll call these your concept groups. Within the concept groups, you’ll join the terms together with OR. The OR search will find items that include at least one of the terms you include, so you’ll get a lot of results from these searches.

Next, you’ll join the searches you just created for your concept groups with AND. In the type of search we’re building, the AND search will find items that include at least one term from each concept group.

Once you have your concept groups mapped out, you can begin your research on PsycINFO® by following these steps. For more detailed information for your platform – APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid or ProQuest – please view our presentation on SlideShare.

Before you type anything, login into (or create) your personal account. This allows you to edit your search, and to save the search to run again later.
Open your PsycINFO advanced search page. Customize the search by adding more rows for search terms, and changing the conjunction from AND to OR.
Most platforms will search All Text or All Fields as a default. This is a fine starting point, or you can pick a particular field to search, such as Keywords, Abstract, or Title.
Type in the terms for your first concept group: ADHD OR ADD OR hyperactivity OR attention deficit disorder. Run the search and save it to your account
Run the rest of the concept group searches and save them.
Within the saved searches page, you can combine your searches with AND. Save this master search too!
This may be a large number of results to work with. Now that your full search is saved, you can further refine it by adding or removing terms, or adding limits such as document type or methodology. If your project is long term or ongoing, you can run this saved search once a month or once a week to review just the recently published articles on the topic.

For more detailed information for your platform – APA PsycNET, EBSCOhost, Ovid or ProQuest – please view our presentation on SlideShare.

APA PsycNET: slides 5-13
EBSCOhost: slides 14-21
Ovid: slides 22-29
ProQuest: slides 30-37

If you’re affiliated with a college or university, you can ask a librarian for assistance with your search. 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.

Related Training Resources

Using Index Terms and Keywords (APA PsycNET): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFeyRb73yZM

PsycINFO YouTube Channel playlist: Using the Methodology Limiter: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZhiJFnGuh4whhw0wUwrrYhFWYvbedmiA

Setting up an alert (APA PsycNET): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVdD0UtC-Xg

You may be interested in attending our PsycINFO Results Management training (all platforms): http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/training/webinars-students.aspx

Tutorial Thursday: Finding Empirical Articles

Posted on September 1, 2016August 30, 2016 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 →

PsycINFO Expert Tip: Classification Codes

Posted on July 22, 2016July 18, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Individual Subscribers, For Librarians, For Students

Have you ever noticed the Classification Codes in PsycINFO® and wondered what they’re for?

The Classification Codes limiter on APA PsycNET.

Our indexers tag and categorize each item in PsycINFO so searchers can more easily locate exactly what they need. Classification Codes categorize an item, such as a journal article, by its main theme. Each item receives one, sometimes two, Classification Codes. Continue reading →

Tutorial Thursday & Translated Topic Guides

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

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.