Psychology Resources Guide

There are 3 American Psychological Association (APA) databases that will provide you with citations and full text for authoritative literature on your topic. All three databases use the ProQuest platform:

• PsycINFO provides citations and abstracts to scholarly journal literature. Some full text is available. Journals from a variety of publishers, both national and international, are indexed here. 
• PsycBOOKS provides citations to scholarly books, and the electronic texts of the books are available.
• PsycARTICLES provides full-text access to scholarly journal literature published by the American Psychological Association. While everything here is full-text, it includes fewer journals (yet those journals are of high quality). 

If you wish, you can search all 3 at the same time. 

The Annual Review surveys and critiques the leading research throughout the field of psychology. The Annual Review is abstracted, and DeWitt Library provides full-text access to the review essays. This database is useful for discovering and evaluating recent research on a specific topic.

When you select a topic in psychology to research, it's important to determine appropriate search terms for that topic.  For example, pretend you are interested in how birth position in a family affects children, specifically how they do in school.  It can help to frame your topic as a succinct question:  How does birth order affect academic success?

Look in your topic question for keywords and phrases; in this case, birth order and academic success.  These are terms you can begin your search with.

For psychology research for journal articles, you will often use the APA (American Psychological Association) databases.  More information on these is below.  There are some important things to remember when using these databases:

1. The APA databases use a controlled vocabulary.  A controlled vocabulary means that the APA has selected terms, and articles indexed in their databases are categorized under these terms.  Your searches will return better results if you use their vocabulary rather than natural language. 
    
2. Each APA database provides access to the APA thesaurus.  It's available on the Advanced Search screen.  
   
   
   
   Because the databases use a controlled language, the Thesaurus tab will help get results that relate to your subject. For example, searching in the Thesaurus for "success" returns the related word "achievement."  Seeing that, you now know that a better search term in the APA databases would be "academic achievement," rather than "academic success."