Transcript No Slide Title

Electronic Resources
for Psychology
Karine Barker and Kate Williams
8th February 2006
Learning aims
By the end of today’s session you will:
• have gained confidence in the use of eresources relevant to psychology
• be able to construct a search strategy,
using appropriate search terms and
Boolean connectors
• be able to identify and use appropriate
information sources
• know who to ask for help!
Google etc
• Fast, easy to use
• But remember:
– You may find that the article you want is
number 1001!
– It can be hard to limit/re-run searches
– You must assess the quality of information
Useful internet resources
 Google
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Scholar
 SCIRUS – scientific search engine
Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Reviewed internet resources. Subject hubs:
BIOME - Health & Life Sciences
– http://biome.ac.uk/
• SOSIG - Social Sciences
– http://www.sosig.ac.uk/
OxLIP
• Oxford Library Information Platform – your
gateway to electronic resources
– Library catalogues including OLIS
– Bibliographic databases
– Full-text electronic journals
– Internet sites (subject gateways)
– Reference works & Statistics
Glossary
• Library Catalogue = a list of books,
journals, maps, records etc. held in the
library arranged in a systematic manner
• Bibliographic Database = an indexed
source of citations of journal articles
Accessing OxLIP
• Access from any Oxford University computer
• If you need access from a non-University PC
– Arrange before you leave Oxford
– Some allow access via Athens: register for a personal
Athens account
– If database does not use Athens, contact OUCS to
arrange remote access (VPN) to the Oxford University
network.
Electronic journals
• Majority listed together on TDNet
• Full-text journal articles – for viewing on screen,
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printing or emailing
New collection added:
PsycARTICLES from
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APA
Full text journal articles
Includes more than 50 peer-reviewed journals
1985 Some book chapters
Bibliographic databases
• Excellent for locating journal articles, book
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chapters and book reviews
Journals more up to date than books
Some are general and some subject specific
There are some links to full text via “TOUR”
button
Not all references held in Oxford
Different interfaces but similar functionality
Interdisciplinary databases
• Web of Knowledge (including Web of Science)
• Covers all subject areas

Very good for citation searching
• SCOPUS
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New from Elsevier
25 million abstracts
Covers sciences and social sciences
Strong on free text searching
Citation searching (last 10 years)
The key psychology database:
PsycINFO –
• Coverage: 1806 – present day
• Bibliographic database: citations and abstracts
from scholarly journals
• Over 2 million records from 2,000 journals
• Updated weekly
• Strong on thesaurus searching
New look PsycInfo
• From March 2006 shift to OVID interface for all
medical and related databases, including:
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PsycInfo - psychology
Medline - medicine
Embase - pharmacology
Cinahl - nursing
AMED – complementary medicine
• Same content – just looks different!
How to start your search
• Choose a clear research topic.
e.g. Investigate the methods through
which language acquisition occurs in
babies.
• Break the topic into search concepts.
There are 3 main concepts to search for.
What are they?
Language acquisition in babies
• language
• acquisition
• babies
• Use these as your first search terms. You will
probably find more terms from retrieved
records while searching.
Searching techniques
• AND, OR (Boolean connectors)
• AND to narrow the search
• OR to broaden the search (synonyms,
British/American spellings)
• For free text searching, if a term has
variant spellings or different endings,
truncate it (using $ in Ovid)
• E.g. enzym$ for enzyme, enzymes, enzymology
etc
OR, AND
language
acquisition
babies
Search string
• Search terms, e.g.:
• language
AND
• acquisition OR development
AND
• babies OR toddlers