Finding Articles in Psychology

Finding Articles for the Psychology Laboratory Report
There is a great amount of psychology available on the internet. Search engines will
help you to sift through the information and more academically-relevant engines
(e.g., Google Scholar) will help you to focus in on scholarly material. However, some
of the most efficient searching for academically-relevant material can be achieved
using resources held by the university library. We will illustrate some of these by
showing you how to find articles relevant to your first written assignment in
psychology.
Using the UWA Library Psychology Subject Guide
To begin with, let us go to the Psychology guide at the library
1
. Begin with the library
homepage (http://www.is.uwa.edu.au/) and click on the “Subject Guides” option
under “OneSearch”. Click on the LibGuides link, then under “Guides”, select “All”
and search the list for “Psychology”. Clicking on this should bring you to the
Psychology Subject Guide. This page provides information resources available to
undergraduates in the School of Psychology. You may want to bookmark the page
so that you can return to it later.
To find references you could use Google Scholar. The library guide found at
http://libguides.library.uwa.edu.au/google_scholar?hs=a will let you know how to set
it up to access “Find it @ UWA” and to link to EndNote.
How to use Google Scholar to find articles (by Adelln Sng)
1. Go to scholar.google.com.au
2. Click on “Scholar preferences” to the right of the search bar
3. Under Library Links, type in “University of Western Australia” and click Find
Library
4. Tick “The University of Western Australia – FindIt@UWA”
5. Click “Save Preferences”
6. You’ll be taken back to the Google Scholar webpage
7. Type in the article that you’re looking for, or search terms: e.g. levels of
processing
8. If you are interested in the article, click on FindIt@UWA (to the right of the
article title). Sometimes, you can access the PDF directly (2).

1
If you are not on a computer on the university campus you may have to enter your username and password
at some point to verify that you are entitled to access the material.

You will be brought to a page that lists the online options available at UWA. Click on
“Go” (or “Full text online from”) and you will be brought to a sign-in page. Sign in
using your student number and pheme password.


9. You can download the PDF
version of the article.




2
Click
Go
Sometimes provides recommended/similar articles
Citation Searching (by Melissa Burgess)
If you are interested in a particular reference, citation searching allows you to
find published articles which cite that reference. This can be a useful way to find
related research, and to identify developments in the field since the publication of the
original article. The number of times a paper has been cited can also give you a
broad idea of its ‘effect’, or the degree to which it has been influential in the research
field.
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) produces 3 indexes to enable
citation searches.
• Science Citation Index (SCI) – covers several thousand science and technology
journals.
• Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) – covers over one thousand social science
journals.
• Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI)- covers over one thousand arts and
humanities journals.

These citation indexes can all be searched online using Web of Science. To access
Web of Science, simply go to the library homepage www.library.uwa.edu.au. On the
homepage enter ‘Web of Science’ as a title in the super search tool.
Click search, and the following screen will be displayed.




Click on ‘Web of Knowledge’ and then select ‘View online’

(Alternatively, Web of Science can be accessed from the Psychology Library Guide
under “Multidisciplinary Databases”.)





Click the ‘Web of Science’ tab, and then click the ‘Cited Reference Search’ link.



Enter your criteria and click ‘search’.

Note: As the cited reference index list draws references directly from the citing
papers, if an author has made an error in citation this may affect your search. Web of
science allows you to select all variants of your search by using check boxes.




Check any boxes that correspond to the citation you are interested in. Click ‘finish
search’ and the cited reference index will list all articles that cited the paper you have
searched for.


Further information on citation searching is available at:
http://www.library.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/524772/Citation_Searchin
g2.pdf

Using Refined Searching in PsycINFO
Finally, to refine a search you may combine search terms within PsycINFO. This is
perhaps the most powerful and efficient way to find articles but it will take you a while
to navigate your way around. For instance, some of the strategies that you use in
Google (such as putting search terms in inverted commas – “levels of processing”)
to refine a search do not work in PsycINFO. There is a wealth of information on the
Psychology Subject Guide on the library website (I hope you are picking up a theme
here). If you look at the right hand side of the page under the “Journals” tab you will
find a link to the APA web site with extensive training material for PsycINFO, You
Tube training videos, as well as videos and documentation available from OvidSP.
You can combine other terms (such as “critique”) with your concept of interest to see
who has published critiques. A little creative thought will help you limit the
astounding array of material available to you into useable subsets.