Use these databases to search the psychology, health sciences, or education literature to find abstracts of articles of interest to you. The challenge is to discover the best terms for your topic with so many resources available online. They are listed by subject and alphabetically under "Articles & Databases " on the Library Home Page.
Big Full-Text Databases can be a good place to start. These databases cover many disciplines and include a lot of full-text articles from academic journals. The best ones to try would be: Academic Search Premier, OmniFile Full Text, JSTOR, and Proquest Research Library.
Social Sciences Package, allows you to search the following databases, either individually or in groups: ASSIA: Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts, Sociological Abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts, PAIS International & Archive, PILOTS Database (Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress), and Physical Education Index.
PsycINFO, produced by the American Psychological Association (APA), provides the best coverage of psychology literature with citations and abstracts for over 1,800 journals, books, chapters of books, and more. However, it does not include any full-text articles, but many will be available in our library or through Interlibrary Loan. For better search results, try:
- Controlled vocabulary (descriptors/subjects) found in the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms (print and online)
- Search limits such as document type (journal article) or publication type (literature review)
- Boolean operators to narrow or broaden your search
- AND - default search, expands (cats and dogs)
- OR - at least one of the terms, expands, helpful for alternate terms (cats or dogs)
- NOT - excludes terms (cats not dogs)
- OR - at least one of the terms, expands, helpful for alternate terms (cats or dogs)
- Truncation - psycholog? finds psychology, psychologist, psychological etc;
- Wild Card - wom*n finds -woman or women
- Exact Phrases - in single quotes ('major depression')
- Adjacenct Terms - near each other, terms near each other, author names (routhieaux adj b)
- Search limits such as document type (journal article) or publication type (literature review)
PsycARTICLES is a sub-set of PsycInfo and contains full-text articles from journals published by APA (American Psychological Association) and related organizations, most from 1985-present.
MEDLINE provides comprehensive coverage of health sciences literature, including psychology. PubMed includes over fifteen million citations, plus links to other useful sites. PubMed Central is a free digital archive of life sciences journal articles.
ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) produced by the U.S. Department of Education contains citations and abstracts of the international journal and report literature in education and related fields. It also has a thesaurus and uses EJ#s to indicate journal articles and ED#s for documents or reports.
There may be other sources in the Social Sciences list of databases that would be useful to you (e.g., Annual Reviews).