Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association by This guide was created for Dr. Tarner's PSY 216: Sensation and Perception, Spring 2024, by Kevin Moore.
APA PsycInfo is a subscription database provided by Musselman Library that will help you identify original research articles on your topic. Its many features include:
APA PsycArticles is a separate subscription database that, compared to PsycInfo, has more comprehensive coverage of journals published by the American Psychological Association and Canadian Psychological Association. It only indexes articles from around 100 journals, though, so starting with PsycInfo will usually be a better bet.
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:
Connect your database search terms with AND (narrows), OR (broadens), or NOT (narrows) in order to be more specific about the relationship between the keywords.
Put quotes around two or more words in order to tell the database to find those exact words as a phrase as opposed to individual search terms. This is useful if you know a particular phrase will be used in the literature you want to find.
Place an asterisk (Shift + 8 = *) at the end of a root in order to search every autocompleted version of that word at the same time. This is an easy way to search multiple keywords at once without needing to type them into multiple searches.
In PsycInfo and PsycArticles, you can use the syntax N# to specify that you want both search terms to appear within # words of each other in the text. Searching this way will filter out a lot of results you might have otherwise seen, but the ones you're left with have a better chance of being highly relevant for you and your research.