PSYC 470-302: Friendship & Attraction (Fall 2015): Finding articles - beyond APA PsycInfo

APA PsycInfo is a tremendous resource, but sometimes your subject will straddle its boundaries. If you're working on neuroscientific topics, you will want to search Medline or PubMed. If it's social psychology, Sociological Abstracts is a good database to look at. General or nonsubject databases might also be useful, either for their special features (Web of Science) or for the formats they cover (ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Fulltext)

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Fulltext is the one-stop source for information on US and Canadian doctoral dissertations and masters theses. PQDT provides fulltext dissertations from most universities and colleges starting with 1997, and it includes many fulltext or page-image dissertations before 1997 too.

HINT! Use PQDT's "Anywhere except full text (NOFT)" search key. It's a full-text database and - unless you're searching for a very specific term of art or name, your results will be overwhelming. NOFT searches titles and abstracts.

Web of Science - also known as "The citation indexes", including Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index - is all about article bibliographies. As the database covers a wide range of subjects (it's strongest in the life sciences), your citation chasing will return broader results than similar tools in APA PsycInfo.

Got an article you really like?

1. Find it in Web of Science.
2. Look at its "Times Cited" link to see other more recent articles that have included it in their bibliographies.
3. Look at its "Related Records" to see other articles that share references in their bibliographies.

As the database covers a wide range of subjects (it's strongest in the life sciences), your citation chasing will return broader results than similar tools in APA PsycInfo.

Got a methodology, tool, or technique you want to see applied to your topic?

• Consult an encyclopedia or handbook for the classic publication about that methodology.
• Do a "Topic search" in Web of Science, the broader the better.
• Do a "Cited Reference search" in Web of Science for the classic publication. (You're looking for the classic's citation in an article bibliography.)
• Use "Search History" to combine the two searches.

When in doubt, ask for help. Cited reference searching in Web of Science can be tricky.