Conducting Library Research
William Ashton, Ph.D.
YorkCollege, CUNY
This is best viewed in web layout.
Librarians can help you with learning how to find and navigate PsycInfo, printing out articles, ordering articles, finding books and ordering books.
There are three major steps to doing library research. However, you will need to iterate upon those three steps multiple times.
That’s my first warning about library research: it takes time.
My second warning is that you must read the articles you do find.
My third warning is that after you read article, you’ll need to do some more library research.
And here’s my final warning. Library research is done online using computer search engines. Many students feel that the computer will do all of the work for them. I had one student who brought me an article he said he was having problems understanding. The assignment was a simple one: he had to find an article that was published in the last five years and review it. I read the article and I had problems understanding the article! It was a very advanced experimental psych article. I asked him why he chose this article to review and he said, “It was the first one the computer gave me.” Don’t accept the first article the computer gives you! You will have to use your own judgment.
Now that we’re done with the four warnings, let’s get to the three steps.
Step 1: Get a “start”.
The first article you find is the hardest finding. There are several ways to find that first article or the “start” as I call it.
1.Look in your textbook (or an appropriate textbook) for articles cited.
2.Look in psychology sourcebooks, such as the Annual Review of Psychology, for citations.
3.Look in (non-text) books written on your topic of interest.
4.Ask your professor for references.
5.Go to PsychInfo (or another search engine) and do a keyword search (I don’t recommend this option. It seems the easiest; just type something into a computer. However, you will have a difficult time evaluating all of the citations you get returned from your search. This option is really a BIG waste of your time. Option #1{textbooks} works the best for students.).
The Annual Review of Psychology
This, as the name implies, is a yearly publication. Each year the editors ask a respected person in a field of psychology to write a review chapter on the advances in their field. The way things go, you can expect almost every field in psychology to have a chapter every five years or so.York library has the Annual Review. The best way to find a chapter is to browse the indexes or search the indexes.Go to the Annual Review webpage via the Library’s website.
For example, I searched for suntanning and found nothing. So I tried heath psychology.
And I found a chapter from 1999.
This chapter should have great references to many articles which could be a “start” for me.
Finding Books
The process is similar from either home or school. The way the webpages look will change, but the basics are still the same.
I originally searched for suntanning under all fields to no avail. Then I tried health and psychology using and to look for books with both terms.
This search resulted in the following books.
Record #3 may be a fruitful source for references which could be a “start.”
Getting to PsychInfo
From the Library’s main webpage, follow the link to find articles.
Here you have many choices of databases to search. To begin with, let’s limit ourselves to PsychInfo.Find PsycInfo. Follow that link by clicking on the yellow box if you are on campus (or on the VPN) or the green house if you are home.
A Diversion -- What to Look for
Back when I was a college student, we didn't have library databases like this (back when I went to college, it was a lot harder than it is now for you folks -- we hade to walk the 20 miles to campus in the snow every day … even in the summer). There were benefits to this. We had card catalog systems, index cards for each book in the library in giant file cabinets. Thus, to look for books, you used the subject headings that someone else made up. This someone else probably knew a lot about the area of research and came up with logical and useful subject headings.
But now, with the computer, you have to make up your own "subject heading" in the words you type into a search engine. This is probably guesswork on your part. Unfortunately, you may guess wrong. To avoid guessing wrong, it's best to check with a databases' thesaurus first.
To access PsychInfo's thesaurus, click the thesaurus button.
Next, type in your guess.
My guess, suntanning, didn’t return any search terms that PsychInfo recognized. So I tried health psychology.
And I found several categories to look at. I didn’t find suntanning but I found several interesting search terms.
Looking in the thesaurus for search terms is very useful if you don’t know what you are looking for.
Now you are at the PsychInfo Search Page. A basic search looks like this. You have the option of typing three terms. These terms could be a keyword, subject, title or author’s name. The search page’s default is to search in default fields meaning all of the fields. In using search engines, the general advice is to begin a search as broadly as possible and then narrow the search parameters once you get (too many) results.Default field is the broadest parameters possible.
Let’s say that you’re searching for articles and books on the psychological aspects of suntanning. Type suntanning in one of the find fields and press the search button.
You will then get the Results page listing all of the items in the PsychInfo database with the word suntanning in any of the fields. Suntanning may be in the reference list, but nowhere else. An article about rats could have been written by Dr Bob Suntanning. Both of these articles will be returned. (This is exactly why I ask you to avoid a search like this).
If any titles interest you, click on them. This will take you to the abstract.
Read the abstract. If you then feel that reading the article is worth your while, then you need to find the article. You’ll notice that at the bottom of this abstract page is a hyperlink labeled Linked Full Text. An abstract with aLinked Full Text hyperlink or a PDF Text hyperlink means that the article is available online. To view the article online, follow the hyperlink.
Read the article and determine if the article is appropriate to your research question. If it is not, go back and find another article. If it is appropriate, go on to Step 2.
Step 2: Go Backward.
While reading your start article, you will see other previous articles or books cited as sources of information. As you read the article, note what you believe to be important pieces of information to your research question. Then note the source that piece of information was attributed to. In APA style, sources of information in an article or book will be indicated by the author’s name and the year of publication:
Broadstock, Borland and Hill (1996) measured knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and sun protective behaviour among nearly 5000 secondary school students in Victoria, Australia. They found a high awareness of sun protection issues but also positive attitudes towards having a tan. Girls were more knowledgeable than boys but still desired a darker tan than boys. Although knowledge increased with age, 15-year-olds had attitudes which were least conducive to sun protection.
Thus, this piece of information is attributed to an article written by Broadstock, Borland and Hill in 1996. To find the full reference to this article (the journal title, volume and page numbers) go to the back of the article. Towards the end (usually it’s at the end) of the article is a reference list.
The reference list of an article is an excellent source to find other articles and books, which predate your “start,” that are either about your research topic or have importance to your research question. Once you have identified a likely article, search for that article to find its abstract. If the abstract looks promising, either find the journal in the library or find the article online.
Mining reference lists like this is a valuable source of other articles and books. Reference lists allow you to go backward in time and find useful sources.
Step 3: Going Forward
While reference lists allow you to look backwards, searching citations of an article will allow you to look forward in time and look for other articles or books vital to your research question. Here’s how you do that.
Let’s say that you’ve identified that Castle, Skinner and Hampson (1999) article from above as critical to your research question. That is, this article was very close to what you’re looking for. That article was published in 1999. Don’t you wonder if anyone else has based their own research on that Castle, Skinner & Hamspon article? You don’t have to wonder, thanks to the people at PsychInfo. Notice at the top of the abstract page there is a hyperlink for Times Cited.
This link will take you to a list of articles and books published after 1999, which cite the Castle, Skinner & Hampson (1999) article.Cool!
Follow this link to see another way to search forward!
Here is the page containing a list of article which have cited Castle, Skinner & Hampson (1999). That likely means that these articles are related to or build upon Castle, Skinner & Hampson (1999)! Again, don’t trust the computer. You will need to read the abstracts and then the articles themselves and you will need to use your judgment as to whether the article is important to your research question.
Thus, Times Cited lets you go forward in time. This is most useful when you have narrowed down your research question and are tying to find a research thread. A research thread is a series of (at least three) articles which build upon the earlier articles.
With experience you will notice that experiments do not stand alone but are closely related to other experiments. For the most part, a current experiment is based upon a prior experiment with only one or two modifications. That’s the nature of scientific research. This means that for the experiment, that you are currently designing, should be based upon a previous experiment with only a few minor (but theoretically important) changes. The benefits of finding a research thread is that by looking at a series of experiments, which build upon one another, you can see what the next experiment should be. Even if you can’t figure out what the next experiment should be, often the prior researchers will directly tell you in their discussion sections. AND THAT IS YOUR EXPERIMENT! It sounds like cheating, but it’s not. That’s normal science.
Putting it all together.
All that library research is -- is just finding a start article, then going backwards and forwards, and finding new articles. Then you take those new articles you have found and treat them as a start article and go forwards and backwards from them. You find new article and then you do the whole process over again until you find information valuable to your research question or the research thread which allows you to design an experiment!
Advanced Research
Unleashing the Raw Power of PsycInfo
If the search engine returns too many articles, you need to narrow your search parameters. You can do that by moving from default fields to more specific fields.
Let’s say that you wish to find an article by Dan Wegner. Type Wegner in the find field and change the search field to AU Author.
Doing so will only search for the word Wagner in the author fields of articles (Dan has been cited many times and if you search in Default fields you would receive hits for articles which cited his studies).
You can get even more specific than that. Can you find Wegner’s article with the term white bears in the title? Yes, you can.
This search looks for articles with Wegner in the author field and white bears in the title field.
Here are most of the fields you can search in PsychInfo.
Wow! A lot.
Can you find the article I wrote with Art Miller and published in JPSP? Yes, you can!
Other Databases
There are many other databases available to search. If you are having problems finding articles with PsychInfo, then you may wish to expand your search. Also, you may wish to expand your search because of the topic area you are researching. Education, business and pharmacology are areas that intersect psychology. These areas also have several databases of their own. The search engines work almost exactly the same as PsychInfo. Please be careful: many of these other databases contain journals (or even magazines!) which are not peer reviewed. Being peered reviewed (other experts review the article and recommend to the editor changes or whether the article should be published at all) is the milepost of trustworthy scientific literature. If you are using these other databases, please make sure that you are searching only peer reviewed journals. You can do that by checking the peer review only box on the search page.
Good Luck and Good Searching!