Bibliographic databases, online journals and literature searching

Bibliographical databases Bibliographic databases allow you to search for references or specific topics and find related articles. You can use the databases to find the references and then go to the journal publishers website and try and retrieve the article electronically. This is based on the conditions that we subscribe to that journal.

Electronic journal resources Most of the bibliographic databases now give links to the full electronic article. But you can still search publishers websites for particular journal articles. Just because we do not subscribe to a particular publisher or journal, there may be other ways of getting that article that you need.

Journals Journals contain a variety of articles which concentrate on a particular subject area. They are published regularly, unlike books, and so provide a good source of up-to-date information. The image on the left is the front cover of The British Journal of Psychology. This journal is a multidisciplinary psychology journal. There are more specific journals, e.g. Personality and Individual Differences. Journals are also known as serials or periodicals because they are published on an ongoing basis a number of times a year. Each edition of a journal can also be called an issue, part or number. Each issue contains a number of articles. Issues are combined together into volumes.

Journals An article states the results of research or author opinion and in this case is written by academics, or scientific experts. It consists of the title of the article, name of the author, a short summary called an abstract, the full text and usually a list of references to other relevant articles.

Journals Journal references, also called citations, can be expressed in a format as below. It will help you when searching Voyager to understand the various parts that make up a journal article citation:

Performing literature searches Identify search terms Decide which databases to search Inclusion and exclusion criteria e.g. dates, language, and literature type Altering search terms using Boolean search operators (AND, OR, NOT) and search criteria in different fields (keywords, title, author, year). Try to narrow the search to provide a USEFUL and MANAGABLE numbers of search results.

PubMed This is a freely available online medical database through If you can not find articles in psychological databases try pubmed as a lot of the psychological literature is closely tied with medical literature and will therefore be on this and other databases.

Other databases & resources Scopus - Google Scholar - Google books – Example of specialist databases - Autism Data data.aspx data.aspx

Other resources Wikipedia – free general encyclopaedia JSTOR World Cat -

StudyNet Learning Resources Learning Resources By subject, voyager, ebooks, exam papers, databases, journals, video portal. 2 minute video on to using the learning resources on StudyNet DF085A FEBE/$FILE/generic%20lr%20vi deo%20aug10.swf DF085A FEBE/$FILE/generic%20lr%20vi deo%20aug10.swf

Subject resources Toolkit for Psychology psychologycog psychologycog Links to Online databases covering all subjects e.g. advertising, nursing, education, newspaper archive etc.

Online journals Online Portal – e.g. Ingenta Connect, Directly through the website of the Journal publisher, e.g. Wiley Blackwell. Or via the links provided on StudyNet

Online journal articles These will be in.pdf (adobe acrobat format) Can print these articles or save them to disk Can copy text from most unless they have been protected. Use the text select tool. Then copy and paste into MS Word. Inter-library loan requests Can only open them once to print then the file is deactivated

Other tips If you can not find an article in electronic form go to the Authors website. There are usually links to their work in electronic form If you are starting a new research area try using a general textbook, or a review journal such as Annual Reviews ( or a more specific book (handbooks) e.g. handbook of social psychology, which can be a good starting point. These will provide you with overviews of areas of research where you can then find references to follow up.