Frequently Asked Questions on APA Style CENTRAL

Posted on September 8, 2016September 7, 2016 by Customer Relations Staff in For Faculty, For Librarians, For Students

APA Style CENTRAL® is an authoritative resource developed by our Style Experts. It is a suite of services and tools designed to ease the pain points encountered by students, instructors and librarians in teaching, learning, and writing in APA Style. Online Introduction webinars are offered weekly, and are a great way to take a structured tour of all of the tools available in this revolutionary new resource.

Many attendees at these sessions – as well as those who are exploring APA Style CENTRAL on their own, through a free trial for their institution – have the same questions. We have gathered them into two sets of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). A General FAQ suitable for all users, including students and faculty, and an Administrative FAQ intended for librarians.

Both of these FAQs are available on the APA Style CENTRAL website. When reviewing these FAQs, don’t miss the extended versions! These are available as PDFs linked at the top of the webpage.

If your question isn’t answered in the FAQs, or if you’d like more details, please contact us at support@apastylecentral.org.

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:

Have You Looked at a PsycINFO Topic Guide Recently?

Posted on April 15, 2016April 1, 2016 by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Librarians

Sample searches from the Management Topic Guide.

Librarians know that PsycINFO® is a wealth of information not just for psychology, but for many other topics as well. After all, our behavior impacts everything we do, so there is an aspect of behavioral science to nearly every discipline.

Students, however, are often unaware of this and think of PsycINFO, and other APA databases, as only covering topics in psychology.

Topic Guides are an instructional aid designed to help make the case as to why a student in a health sciences, education, or management class should consider searching PsycINFO.

At this time, 20 different interdisciplinary Topic Guides are available on our website. Each contains three sample search scenarios, and a list of selected Index Terms. This helps students get a sense of the way in which behavioral scientists engage with these disciplines, and the language to use to find that information in PsycINFO. Continue reading →

Back to School with APA Databases Training Materials

Posted on September 22, 2015November 24, 2015 by Customer Relations Staff in For Librarians

The influx of new faces and fresh perspectives that fall semester brings to an academic campus is refreshing – though it’s often hard to appreciate in the chaos of scheduling and managing requests for instruction and support.

In hopes that we can save you a little time as you prepare for instruction sessions that will require diving into PsycINFO and other APA Databases, this issue provides a quick overview of the training materials you’ll find in our Librarian’s Resource Center. You are welcome to embed, link, adapt, and modify these materials to meet the needs of your students, faculty, and others in need of research support.

Continue reading →