Reading Response to: “Psychology Journal Articles”

Reflection on the readings.

This chapter begins with talking about research and peer review process.  Psychologists prefer to use a quality research because it is done by peer review process, which is a careful and meticulous process of reviewing and contributing to the thought process on the works of professionals by other professionals in a particular field of study.

Such quality research can be seen in PsycINFO and PA, that contains citations and summaries of variety of works.  PycINFO is invaluable tool to researches in psychology as it includes a powerful search engine which could customize particular search in a variety of ways.  That sorting of information not only helps to search for, but also to create infrastructure for sorting the information.

With time, published psychology literature was subdivided into several categories: 1. periodicals, articles and reviews, 2. books and chapters, 3. doctoral dissertations, 4. research & tech report, 5. letters, corrections, editorials, obituaries.

Prior to explaining the science of searching, authors talk about definitions of self.  “I think, therefore I am”  popped in my head.  What does “self” mean, what does “self” represent.  “Self is a psychological concept.” (p. 57)  According to its thesis chapter focuses on gender definitions of self “to illustrate the search for journal research literature in psychology.” Mouth-full!

First we read about Field-Restricted approach to searching the database by two names of the author and  the year of publication to which they yield several citations, one of which is their “target article.”  The article provides additional information such as bibliography, title, institution affiliation, publication information, year, moth, volume, pages, ISSN, brief abstract, data about abstract, and information about the subject content.

Subject Approach.  By reviewing the article found in a search we come up with the table of search terms and phrases,to follow up with the keyword search using truncation and wild-card features of the interface, which allows us to search “plural forms of words with variant spellings.”  For example behav* will retrieve all words for behavior: behaving, behaviors, behavioral, etc.

Thesaurus Search is a different approach which uses thesaurus index terms of the field of study, which is a pre-made list of terms that help reflect your topic.  Thesaurus also helps to find topics that are related to each other.

The other way to find related articles is to search the cited articles and reference lists.

Using psychological abstracts is more limited as one can only search by author and/or by subject.


Electronic Document Retrieval.  There are two way to access the information: 1. Libraries subscribe to the titles the same way as to the printed materials. 2. Linking the article’s citation to its full text.

In conclusion, the world is changing, so does the information.  More sources are available today electronically then they ever have.  In the PA one can search using subject, author, abstract.  PsycINFO contains all of the features of the first and much more, such as keword, abstract search, links, and more.

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