Access
Note: You will need to use your Single Sign-On user name and password to access some library resources.
Articles and Where to Find Them
The best place to find articles is to search the library's databases. They contain magazines, journals, newspapers, reference books, video files, audio files, and podcasts.
What databases will be the best for this project?
You can search any of the Databases for Social Sciences, Psychology & Sociology.
Kirtland librarians recommend the following:
- Psychology Database (ProQuest) This link opens in a new windowInformation on addiction, clinical and social psychology, communication, criminology genetics, neurology, psychology of business and economics, and social welfare - Unlimited users
Browse the issues in Opposing Viewpoints for topics such as children of divorced parents, elderly issues, poverty, teenage pregnancy, and working women.
- Opposing Viewpoints (Gale In Context) This link opens in a new window
Full-text resource covering the study of today's hottest issues including the environment, health, politics and religion - Unlimited users
An InfoTrac Power Search will search many databases at once.
- Gale Databases - Power Search (Gale) This link opens in a new window
20 million+ full-text articles covering a broad spectrum of disciplines and topics from 6,000 scholarly and popular periodicals - Unlimited users
Finding Research Articles
To find a research article, you will want to look in an academic journal. Although it's possible to find journal articles on the open web, it's usually much easier to find them in the library's databases. Most of the library's databases include journal articles.
A good place to look for a psychology research article is in the ProQuest Psychology Journals database. You will see a link to it in the "Where Do I find Articles?" box on this page.
The other tabs in this box will show you how to limit your results to journals.
When you do a basic search of the ProQuest Psychology Journals database, you are likely to get many results. You can use the options on the left side of the screen to limit those results. The image below points to some of the features you can use to refine your results.
You can narrow your results to full text or peer reviewed. You will want to limit the source type to scholarly journals. You can limit the publication date by moving the slider to indicate the desired time frame. You can also eliminate many irrelevant results by choosing article or feature under document type.
Instead of a basic search, you can do an advanced search. The advanced search lets you limit your results right from the start. As in many databases, the advanced search option of the ProQuest Psychology Journals database is located above the search bar. When you click on advanced search, you will see a page like the one shown below.
1) You can enter combinations of search terms and choose where in the record to search - anywhere, anywhere except full text, just in the abstract, etc. See the video on this page for more information about combining search terms and database subject searches.
2) You can set the date range here or on the results page.
3) You can limit your results to scholarly journals.
4) You can choose what document types you are looking for. For this assignment you will probably want to choose articles and features.
Note: When you get your results you will still be able to adjust them further using the left side menu as shown on the Refine Your Results tab of this box.
Quick Tips & Shortcuts for Database Searching (5:19)
This video, from the Memoirs of a Modern Librarian, provides seven helpful search tips that apply to most databases.
Quick Tips & Shortcuts for Database Searching. By Vanessa Garofalo. YouTube. YouTube, 6 Feb. 2013. Web. 14 Oct. 2014.