Psychology: PSY 101 (Delaney)

Searching for Articles

PsycInfo is the best search tool for finding research in psychology and the behavioral sciences. Not only does it cover a lot of journal content, but it's built to help you refine your searches in really useful ways.

Choosing a Research Topic

If you aren't sure where to begin, think about revisiting the website for the APA division you explored for WA#1. See if the division regularly publishes a journal and if you can view the table of contents for a recent issue. This is a quick way to see what sorts of topics professional researchers are currently investigating.

PsycINFO is a subscription database provided by Musselman Library that will help you identify original research articles on your topic.  Its many features includes:

• Citations and abstracts to journal articles, books, book chapters, and dissertations (avoid these!)
• Works published from 1887-present
• Articles from over 2,200 periodicals, mostly peer-reviewed

Once you've found one good article, you can use the database record for that article to perform very targeted searches easily and find related empirical research. Here are a few strategies that may be useful in specific situations:

As you read the abstract of an empirical article, take note of how well it adheres to the standardized structure of a paper presenting original research:

• Introduction: what has already been done on this topic and why it is important to study
• Methods: what the researchers did to test their hypothesis
• Results: what the researchers observed over the course of their testing
• Discussion: why those results are important and advance our understanding of the topic

Reading the abstract is not a substitute for reading the entire paper—you will miss out on nuance, insight, and analysis if you just read a one-paragraph summary of a larger study.

Reading the abstract is an important part of evaluating sources and identifying which articles will be the best fit for your particular research topic, though. It can also help you read the full paper more strategically since you know beforehand what findings the article is building toward sharing with the reader.