PSY-P 259: Introduction to Psychological Inquiry Research Guide

Some overall strategies for locating relevant publications:

• Be sure to search for phrases in quotation marks (e.g. "attachment style", "social media").
• Use built-in Subject filters to narrow results and locate relevant research.
• Skim article titles and abstracts to find new search terms and phrases, identify themes, and modify your search strategy.
• If you don't see a full text link or PDF, try the Look for It link or button. This will either take you to the full text in another database or provide a pre-filled form to request the article via interlibrary loan.
• To check if IUK has access to an article you found cited elsewhere, you can:
  • Copy and paste the "article title" into EDS, or
  • Look for the journal in BrowZine and navigate to the cited volume and issue, or
  • Search for the journal title in IUCAT and navigate to our online access from there, or
  • Email the citation to your librarian.

Recommended search tools:

• Limit your search results to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals to remove dissertations and books. 
• Use the Subject: Major Heading filter on your results page to focus on different aspects of your topic.
• Use psychology-specific filters, like Methodology, Tests & Measures, Classification, and Age, to narrow your results.
• Try building your search with the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms from the banner menu.
  • Select terms and click Add to build a specific search string. Use OR to create a broader search, or select AND to narrow your results to sources which include all of the terms you select. 
  • If you want a certain term to be the central focus of your results, select Major Concept. 
  • To include both a broader term and all of the narrower versions of it, select Explode. 
• Use the Cited References and Times Cited in this Database links below a search result to find related scholarship.

• Quickly narrow your results by checking the Full Text and Peer Reviewed boxes.
• Select More under the Subject filter on your results page to include or exclude keywords to find the most relevant articles for your topic.
• Use the Times Cited tool to find relevant scholarship either in ProQuest databases or Web of Science.

• Copy and paste the title of a journal article into Google Scholar, then click on Cited by to locate sources which have cited the original work.
• If you are looking at a frequently cited work, use the Search within citing articles box.
• Never pay for an article! Use the strategies listed above to locate the full-text through the Library or interlibrary loan.
• When you find sources through Google Scholar, you'll want to double-check that they are indeed peer-reviewed before using them.