Overviews:
Dictionary of Psychology from Oxford Reference Online
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences provides scholarly overviews on various topics in psychology. For this class, these are particularly relevant
Trying to get a deeper overview of research on a topic?
Annual Reviews in Psychology and Annual Reviews in Clinical Psychology are good starting places -- they provide literature reviews of important and emerging areas of research.
Search Tips
- Use synonyms -- there are many ways to express a concept (teenager or teenagers or adolescent)
- Use truncation to get different forms of the word, for example teenage* will retrieve teenagers, teenager, teenaged, etc.
- Use quotation marks when you want an "exact phrase"
- Restrict by date -- most will let you find only the most current five years if you chose that limit.
- Use "controlled vocabulary" (also called descriptors or subject headings) if the database has them. The PsycInfo Thesaurus is a very powerful tool. It helps you identify articles that are about a topic, not just that have the word in the abstract. For example, if you are looking for the cause of a certain psychological problem, the descriptor "etiology" finds material that looks at causality.
- Use the special "limits" or "fields" that the database offers. They really do help you make a more focused and powerful search. PsycInfo lets you use many helpful limits including:
- Methodology-- are you interested in literature reviews? Empirical studies? Clinical trials? Quantitative or qualitative studies?
- Population -- do you want research based on humans? Males vs. females?
- Age of subjects -- adolescents? children? old people?
- Publication type -- do you want articles? dissertations? books?
This guide has been archived
Please note: this course guide was created during a previous semester, and is no longer being actively maintained. For a list of current course guides, please see http://lib.berkeley.edu/alacarte/course-guides.
Find articles
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PsycINFO
Core index to articles in psychology.
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PubMed
Indexes journals in medicine, psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience.
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ProQuest Social Sciences
Is your topic interdisciplinary? This searches core indexes in the social sciences such as sociology, political science, and education in addition to psychology.
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Academic Search Complete
Another interdisciplinary database, but strong in psychology and its related fields.
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PsychiatryOnline
Contains the DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and several full-text psychiatry journals and e-books.
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Web of Science
Includes the Science and Social Sciences Citation Index. These let you find "forward citations" -- update your research by finding articles that cite an article.
UC eLinks and Citation Linker
Sometimes the database you search doesn't link to the fulltext -- it only gives the citation. Click the 
button to see if Berkeley has it online, and if not, it will check for a print version. And if we don't have it at all, it lets you request it through Interlibrary Loan.
What if there isn't a button??? Sometimes you find an article in a bibliography, a book or a footnote -- and you want to see if we have it. The Citation Linker searches through our online databases to see if it's available fulltext. If not, it sets up a search for the paper journal in Melvyl. And if we don't have it at Berkeley, it lets you request it through Interlibrary Loan.