Scholarly Journal Articles & E-Books

Quick Links: Psychology Databases Multidisciplinary Databases Selecting Keywords What is a Scholarly Article? How to Read a Scholarly Article

Psychology Databases

Many people utilize library databases to find academic resources. To locate resources through the Munday Library, you can either use the search bar on our homepage, or go to a specific database such as the ones listed below:

  • PsycArticles – PsycARTICLES, from the American Psychological Association (APA), is a source of full-text, peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology. The database contains more than 140,000 articles from over 60 journals published by the APA and allied organizations. Coverage spans from 1894 to present.
  • PsychiatryOnline – Access to The American Psychiatric Association website, DSM5, American Journal of Psychiatry, and Psychiatric Services.
  • Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection – Provides the full text of articles from 575 journals covering topics such as behavioral characteristics, psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational and experimental methods. Full text dates as far back as 1965.
  • PsycInfo – PsycINFO, from the American Psychological Association, contains abstracts of scholarly journal articles, books, and dissertations. It contains over 2.5 million citations and summaries dating to the early 1800s. The database also includes information about the psychological aspects of related fields such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, technology, linguistics, anthropology, business, law and others.
  • DSM 5 – DSM-5 is used by health professionals, social workers, and forensic and legal specialists to diagnose and classify mental disorders. The criteria are concise and explicit, intended to facilitate an objective assessment of symptom presentations in a variety of clinical settings- inpatient, outpatient, partial hospital, consultation-liaison, clinical, private practice, and primary care.
  • PsycBOOKS – PsycBOOKS is a full-text database that provides electronic access to thousands of scholarly and professional titles published by the American Psychological Association (APA), including the most recent titles in psychological and behavioral science, plus a substantial backfile of classic and historic works.

Multidisciplinary Databases
(Including materials on psychology, health/medical, and behavioral neuroscience)

  • EBSCO Databases – Using this link, you can search all EBSCO databases that contain resources on psychology, counseling, health/medicine, neuroscience, and other social science disciplines. Simply enter your search terms in the box at the top left of the page.
  • JSTOR – Provides core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication. Users may browse by journal title or discipline, or may search the full-text or citations/abstracts.
  • PubMed – PubMed comprises more than 19 million citations for biomedical articles from MEDLINE and life science journals. Citations may include links to full-text articles from PubMed Central or publisher web sites. Provided by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.
  • Science Direct – ScienceDirect contains over 25% of the world’s science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information. Apart from online eBooks, Reference Works, Handbooks and Book Series ScienceDirect offers a rich journal collection of over 2,500 titles. In addition, the Backfiles program offers the ability to search a historical archive of over 6.75 million articles directly from your desktop, back to Volume 1, Issue 1. The collections contain four million articles prior to 1995, and 2.75 million articles from after 1994.
  • Springer eBook Collection – Full text access in HTML and PDF formats to the electronic versions of books published by Springer. Content is in 13 subject areas: Architecture and Design; Behavioral Science; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Business and Economics; Chemistry and Materials Science; Computer Science; Earth and Environmental Science; Engineering; Humanities, Social Sciences and Law; Mathematics and Statistics; Medicine; Physics and Astronomy; and Professional Computing & Web Design.
  • Selecting Keywords

    Depending on what keywords you use, your results can be very different. Before beginning your search, brainstorm some of the words that might help you find the resources you need for your project.

    1. First try expressing your topic in a sentence:

    Ex: Do violent video games have an effect on children?

    2. Generate keyword search terms by identifying the main ideas or concepts within that topic sentence:

    “Do violent video games have an effect on children?” = Violence, video games, effect, and children.

    3. If you don’t find the results you need with your first keywords, try brainstorming related terms or synonyms for the keywords you first identified:

    • violence–> aggressive, aggression, violent
    • video games–>MMO, RPG, RTS, MMPORG
    • effect–>influence
    • children–>adolescents, teens, toddlers, youth, young people
  • What is a journal and a peer-reviewed (scholarly) article?

    Not sure what a journal article is? What does peer-reviewed or scholarly mean?

    Check out this quick video that will explain it:

    If you are having trouble identifying whether an article is considered scholarly or not, this FAQ page can offer some tips on how to tell if a resource is scholarly, authoritative, or popular.

  • How to Read a Scholarly Article

    The length and format of scholarly articles can sometimes feel overwhelming if you are not familiar with their format; this video provides some quick tips on how to navigate scholarly articles for your research: