Psychology Resources
What is a Literature Review?
If this is your first time having to do a literature review, you might be wondering what a "literature review" actually is. Typically, this entails searching through various databases to find peer-reviewed research within a particular topic of interest and then analyzing what you find in order to situate your own research within the existing works.
Watch the following video to learn more:
What is Peer Review?
Most of your literature review will involve searching for sources that have gone through the peer-reviewed process. These are typically academic articles that have been published in scholarly journals and have been vetted by other experts with knowledge of the topic at hand.
Watch the following video to learn more:
How Do I Find Psychology Literature?
The following database are a great place to start to find relevant, peer-reviewed literature within the broad research area of psychology:
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new windowFrom the American Psychological Association (APA), PsycINFO contains nearly 2.3 million citations and abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations in psychology and related disciplines. It is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health.
- DynaMed This link opens in a new windowA clinical reference tool of more than 3000 topics designed for physicians and health care professionals for use primarily at the point-of-care. DynaMed is updated daily and monitors the content of over 500 medical journal and systemic evidence review databases.
- EMBASE This link opens in a new windowEMBASE is a major biomedical and pharmaceutical database indexing over 3,500 international journals in the following fields of health sciences and biomedical research. It is considered as the European version of Medline.
- MEDLINE with Full Text This link opens in a new windowA bibliographic database that contains more than 26 million references to journal articles in life sciences with a concentration on biomedicine. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®).
- Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection This link opens in a new windowProvides full text publications, including peer-reviewed journals. The database covers topics such as emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry & psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational and experimental methods
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowPubMed® comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
- Scopus This link opens in a new windowScopus contains over 47,000,000 records to scholarly publications, trade publications, and conference proceedings on almost all topics. It is an excellent database for cited reference searching. It does not contain full-text articles, but users can get access to full text by using the "Find It" button
- Web of Science This link opens in a new windowWeb of Science is a comprehensive research database. It contains records of journal articles, patents, and conference proceedings, It also provides a variety of search and analysis tools. Web of Science Core Collection is a painstakingly selected, actively curated database of the journals that researchers themselves have judged to be the most important and useful in their fields
