This document provides an introduction to major databases and resources relevant to psychology. It discusses key skills for students such as locating sources, reviewing sources critically, and managing information. It then introduces major abstracting and indexing databases like PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. It explains how to search within these databases effectively using techniques like controlled vocabularies. The document also covers citing sources, using reference management software, and accessing resources remotely.

1. Diane FitzMaurice, Lent 2015

2. The aims of this session are to
 introduce you to the major databases relevant to
psychology
 explain why you should use them and what you can
use them for
 introduce the idea of reference management
 explain when to cite
 highlight the range of psychology-specific resources
available

3. Key skills
 Locating sources
 Reviewing sources critically
 Managing information
 Acknowledging sources

4. Locating information
You will already be used to searching for journal articles
using one of the following:
 ejournals@cambridge
 Google Scholar
 LibrarySearch Plus
Searching within specialist abstracting and indexing (A & I)
databases is another way to find links to the full-text of
known items.

5. A & I databases
 Searching within specialist abstracting and indexing (A &
I) databases is also a very good way to look for unknown
items
 You will do a general subject search as part of the
literature search for your Part IIB dissertation literature
review
 If you have not yet come across the A & I databases, now
is a good time to start using them

6. Major A & I databases for psychology

7. How to find the databases. Go to
www.lib.cam.ac.uk

8. Select the databases tab and
search by database name

9. What do they offer?
The A & I databases provide access to a range of material, including journal articles, conference
proceedings, book chapters, dissertations; they place an emphasis on high quality peer-reviewed
material.
The A & I databases contain records that have been indexed and tagged with
Keywords to facilitate retrieval.
The records usually contain an abstract – or summary – which helps you decide
whether you need to read the whole work.
Records in A & I databases provide links to allow you to check for full text.
The A & I databases allow you to save your searches, so you can
re-run them, or edit them and re-run them.
You can set up alerts so you can find out when new material,
falling within the terms of your search, is published.

10. PsycINFO
 The essential A & I database for psychologists, produced by the American
Psychological Association
 Its focus is on peer-reviewed literature in the behavioural sciences and
mental health
 It indexes articles from around 2.5 thousand relevant journals, and it
contains over 3.7 million records
 PsycINFO also contains records for selected books and dissertations
 It is possible to look at the source list so we know what PsycINFO is
indexing

11. PubMed
 PubMed is more extensive and covers a broader subject area than
PsycINFO
 It contains over 24 million citations from MEDLINE* for biomedical
literature - including the behavioural sciences - and from life
sciences journals, and online books
 As with PsycINFO, we know what PubMed indexes
*MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s bibliographic database,
which contains citations and abstracts from the 5,600 biomedical journals
that it indexes. PubMed provides a user-friendly interface to MedLine.

12. Scopus
 Scopus is a cross-disciplinary search platform
 It is the largest A & I database of peer-reviewed literature, and
it indexes scientific journals, books and conference
proceedings
 It contains 55 million records and covers 21,915 titles
 It is possible to view a source list so we know what it indexes

13. Web of Science
 Web of Science is a cross-disciplinary search platform
 It allows you to search across seven major databases, including
the following:
Science Citation Index
Social Sciences Citation Index
Conference Proceedings Citation Index
 We know what it is indexing because it is possible to view a
source list

14. Tip: knowing how information is catalogued and indexed will help
you carry out successful searches
Example: book records in LibrarySearch
Many books that you can find through LibrarySearch are catalogued at the book title level and do
not contain chapter title information. If you search for a chapter title in LibrarySearch, you are
unlikely to retrieve a record for the book. Although LibrarySearch records for some works do
contain chapter-level information, the majority or records do not, so the best search strategy is
to search at book title level.
Example: journal records in LibrarySearch
Similarly with journal articles, the records in LibrarySearch generally only give a journal title level
description, so searching for a journal article by its title in LibrarySearch will usually be
unsuccessful. (There are records for journal articles in LibrarySearch, but these are mostly for
articles that are only available to view in certain libraries on designated machines from which it is
currently not possible to print.)
Example: records in databases
The majority of the A & I databases are not full-text databases; their records include article titles,
article abstracts (or summaries), author information, subject headings and keywords – so you
can search on these facets, but not the full text.

15. Example of a record for a book where chapter information has not been included
(the underlying MARC 21 catalogue record, and the record as it appears in
LibrarySearch)

16. Learn to use the tools
 Searching in catalogues, search engines and databases can be made more
powerful by getting to know, and then making use of, all the tools that are
available
 Each of the databases has symbols and rules that will help you carry out
nuanced searching
 The asterisk and question mark are commonly-used wildcard symbols
 In many databases you can search for a phrase by using quotation marks
 In Web of Science, proximity searching enables you to specify the distance
between two words for a record containing both words to be retrieved

17. Use Boolean operators to make your database
searches more powerful
All search terms must occur to be retrieved.
TOPIC: tomato AND soup
Retrieves documents that contain the terms tomato and soup.
Any one of the search terms must occur to be retrieved. Use when searching
variants and synonyms.
TOPIC: plum OR cherry OR vine
Retrieves documents that contain at least one of the terms.
Excludes records that contain a given search term.
TOPIC: soup NOT tomato
Retrieves documents with soup, excluding any that also contain tomato.

18. Improving your searches
Some databases have thesauri or controlled vocabularies, use of which will
help you to retrieve better search results. Articles in those databases have
been tagged according to an ontology.
If for example, you are interested in retrieving results about cats, you will
want to find all the records that include the terms lion, tiger, jaguar, leopard,
lynx, and so on and so on. By choosing the appropriate term from the
thesaurus, your search should retrieve all the relevant results, and you don't
have to think what all those terms might be and search on them individually.
Thesauri provide consistent terminology for concepts covered by the
database – they provide a way to retrieve information where different
authors have used different terms to refer to the same concepts.

19. Using the PsycINFO thesaurus

20. Search PubMed using Medical
Subject Headings (MeSH)

21. Google Scholar
You might be asking yourself, why don't I just Google it - why do I need to use these special
databases?
Google Scholar has a place - it is quite good at finding the full text of known items.
However, there are reasons why it should not be your single go-to resource. You should not rely
on it when you are doing a general search.
 You don’t know what Google is indexing. With the A & I databases, you can check their source
lists to see exactly what they index. The specialist databases emphasise peer-reviewed
material
 Google searches very broadly, not within specific relevant corpora
 It has limited ontological knowledge - it doesn’t have a thesaurus from which you can
construct searches
 You end up with a lot of noise when you use Google Scholar

22. Google Scholar
Tip: Go to Settings and set your Library
links to Cambridge so that you get links to
full-text articles when available
Tip: Use the advanced search

23. Peer review
Peer review (also known as refereeing) is a process whereby
manuscripts submitted to a journal by researchers are evaluated by
experts in the field.
Flawed work may be rejected altogether, or would have to undergo
revisions before it was accepted for publication.
So peer-reviewed material has gone through quality control. Material
you discover out there on the web, for example in blogs, has not gone
through this kind of quality control - it is likely to be of unknown
provenance.
Even peer-reviewed papers can be flawed (note the Nature papers on
the creation of stem cells, which were retracted in 2014).

24. Reading sources critically
Rather than being a passive reader, you should keep a number of
critical appraisal questions in mind:
 Is it by an author with an affiliation to a well-known institution?
 Is the paper well-written, in plain language, does it avoid
obfuscation?
 Do assumptions in the paper seem to be valid?
 If the paper is describing research, which research methodology was
used, and was it the most appropriate, given the objectives?
 If there are diagrams and graphs, are they properly labelled?
 Are there any errors?
 Is the article published in a peer-reviewed journal?

25. Managing your sources
In the course of a single taught subject, you encounter a large
number of sources. As you move on to writing a dissertation or
carrying out a project, the number of sources you access
increases.
The question arises about how you manage that information?
If you don't take control of it, you may find yourself covering the
same ground over and again, and wasting valuable time.
There are many tools that can help you to manage your
references, and these tools do a lot more besides. We refer to
them as ‘reference managers’.

26. What do reference managers do?
 They allow you to import citations from databases and websites
 They help you get organised by letting you organise the citations you collect into
folders
 Reference managers help you to keep track of where you have already been
 They help you to format citations and create bibliographies
 They allow you to add notes to your references
 And save and organize PDFs
 They will help you to avoid plagiarising the work of others

27. Beware! Garbage in, garbage out
Check the records you save in your reference manager.
Not all records are of good quality and you may need
to add information to them.
This point is very important when it comes to
generating your bibliography.

28. Examples of reference managers
 Mendeley
 Zotero
 EndNote basic

29. Which one should you use?
Consider the following when choosing:
 Does the reference manager work with the browser and word processing
program you use?
 Which reference manager does your supervisor, or your collaborators, use?
 How much free storage is offered?
If you still don’t know, then try them out and choose the one you take to the
most! The reference managers mentioned (EndNote Basic, Mendeley,
Zotero) offer free (although you may find yourself paying for extra storage).
There are many on the market (for example, Citavi, Paperpile, Papers).

30. Citing sources I
It is good practice to acknowledge all of your sources in your work.
 It demonstrates that you have researched your subject and
that you know what you’re talking about, so it gives your work
credibility
 It allows the person who is reading your work to go and check
the source on which you are basing your arguments
 It places your work in context
 It gives credit to those authors whose work has influenced
your work. This point relates to plagiarism. You must not
present another’s work as if it were your own. Use a reference
manager to keep track of your sources and avoid plagiarism

31. Citing sources II
 If you cite a source, the implication is that you have read
it
 Don’t rely on secondary sources - try to use primary
sources as much as possible
 You don’t need to cite where something is common
knowledge. If in doubt, it is better to cite
 You should adhere to a single citation style in your work.
You might consider using:
 APA citation style (The American Psychological Association
citation style, 6th edition)
 Harvard citation style

32. Cite Them Right will help you if you are unsure about
how to cite a particular source

33. We have access to...
 Oxford Bibliographies Online
 (Psychology)
 Oxford Handbooks Online
(Psychology)
 Very Short Introductions
 Annual Reviews
 DSM-5 Online
Links are given at the end

34. Going away from Cambridge?
 When you are away from Cambridge, you can still access almost all
of the electronic resources you have access to on campus
 It's a good idea to access resources via eresources@cambridge (or
LibrarySearch for ebooks), because you will be prompted to log in
with your Raven password
 If you find yourself coming up against a paywall, search for the login
button. If you cannot immediately see it, look out for the following:
 Shibboleth
 UK Higher Education
 Institutional Access
 Log in via your Institution
These are some of the terms that will lead you to the correct login page

35. Reading and links
Two invaluable books for psychologists:
 American Psychological Association (Ed.). (2010). Publication manual of
the American Psychological Association (6th ed). Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association.
 Sternberg, R. J., & Sternberg, K. (2010). The Psychologist’s Companion:
A Guide to Writing Scientific Papers for Students and Researchers (5th
ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 (Available as an ebook http://search.lib.cam.ac.uk/?itemid=|eresources|385430
Click on ‘Available online from CBO’.)

36. Databases
 http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/eresources/index.php (Click on
the databases tab and search for the database by name.)
 http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/eresources/subjectresources.php
?subjectId=31&submit=Go (Browse the list of Experimental
Psychology resources.)

37. Reference managers
 Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/
 Zotero https://www.zotero.org/
University training in using reference managers:
http://training.cam.ac.uk/ucs/
(Search by name of reference manager.)

38. Other resources
Oxford Bibliographies Online (Psychology)
Access via the E-resources Experimental Psychology Subject Guide
Oxford Handbooks Online (Psychology)
Find via LibrarySearch or http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/ (on campus)
Very Short Introductions
Find via LibrarySearch or http://www.veryshortintroductions.com/(on campus)
Annual Reviews
Find via ejournals@cambridge (search for Annual review of psychology or Annual
review of neuroscience)
DSM-5 Online
Access via the E-resources Experimental Psychology Subject Guide

39. Image credits
Zotero photo credit: finnarne via photopin cc
Mendeley photo credit: Mendeley.com via
photopin cc