PSY4018Literature searching / finding journal information

Aims & Outcomes

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Planning your searching

Introduction to searching different databasesPsycinfo Web of KnowledgeGoogle Scholar

How to set up alerts on your interest/research areas Zetoc

Evaluating what you find

Where to find referencing information

Housekeeping

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How’s it going?Can you find the books on your

reading list?Can you renew books?Can you reserve books?Do you know who to contact for help?Library Subject Guides?

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Preparation

Planning your search - keywords

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Boring but WORTH IT!

1. Pick out your concepts and separate them drugs, addiction, therapy, offenders, etc

2. Think of other words that are similar to your key words but represent the same conceptsIllegal drugs, Counselling, criminals,

programmes (programs)3. Think of narrower words that fit into your terms

to hone your search if you’re getting too much information

Keywords

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Really worth a 5 minute brainstorm before you search - will save you time later - I promise!

Searching one word for your concept will not bring you all the results! And sometimes none! Not everyone uses the same terminology for one idea

Can use the library worksheet if you like (also helps you organise how to combine the terms with ‘AND’ or ‘OR’)

Examples follow

crime

•Criminal*•Offender*•Convict*•“Criminal population”•Inmate*•“Criminal justice system”

Drug addicti

on

•“Substance abuse”•“Illicit drugs”•“Illegal drugs”•“addictivesubstances”

therapy

•Treatment*•Programme* OR Program*•Counsel*

What research has been conducted on the use of therapy for offenders who take drugs?

HMP

•“Youth offenders” •“Repeat offenders”•“First time offenders” •“Violent offenders”

• Opiates• “Psychotropic drugs”•“Prescription drugs” • Specific drug names ... Prozac, cannabis, crack cocaine, heroin etc

• “Talk therapy”• “Behavioural therapy” OR CBT OR “Behavioral therapy” • Medicat*• “Family Therapy”• “residential therapy” OR rehab*

Synonyms

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Offender DSPD Treatment

Criminal* “severe personality disorder” Therapy

Inmate* “personality disorder” Programme*

Convict* Program*

“Criminal population” Counselling

“Criminal justice system” Education

Offender DSPD Treatment

“Youth offenders” Violen* “Talk therapy” OR “group therapy”

“Repeat offenders” Sex* “cognitive therapy” OR “behavioural therapy”

“First time offenders” Medicat*

“Violent offenders” “individual treatment plans” OR customise*

HMP “Self management”

Chromis

Boundary management

“After care”

Narrower Terms

Useful clues/things to pick up on

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Literature searching is a cycle – you will often need to improve your search / play around with a few different searches

Search strategiesCitation – you follow leads from useful articles, books and reading

listsExpanding your keyword base as you go along – keep an eye out

for alternative keywords in your search results – so you can rerun your searches and perhaps find things you missed

Start big – BUT you may have to get smaller and more specific if you don’t want to look through hundreds of results!

Limiting the search strategy – a way to answer a very broad/general questione.g. randomized trials; publication date; empirical study; English

language; type of drug; type of offender (race/age/crime)

Get better results & find things quicker

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Watch out for spellings US/UK = behavior / behaviour Counselor / counselling

Truncate your term* = Offend* = will find offending, offender, offenders Counsel* = will find counselling, counsellor, counsellors

Keep phrases together with speech marks “substance abuse”

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Searching

General principles of searching

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Volunteer please!

http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/elearning/learn/topic/gamenesting/index.php

PsycInfo

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Specific psychology database - subject specific information unlike other databases like Summon (searches all subjects) or Web of Knowledge (search broadly across sciences or social sciences)

Articles are tagged with psychology subject headings when indexed – useful for searching

Not completely full text but can limit results to full text Run by APA Worth noting US bias – if being comprehensive in search

would have to take this into account and use other resources as well

Getting into the databases....

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REMEMBER! Always use MyUniHub as a gateway to library

resources

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• Select Psycinfo • You can select PsycARTICLES Full Text but you will get far fewer results – to start it’s best to search PsycInfo and then limit within that to full text if you get enough results

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• ALWAYS use Advanced Search – this allows you to combine your different concepts with ‘AND’ or ‘OR’ • And leave ‘Map subject term heading’ ticked – this gives you a useful way of accessing records tagged as being in a subject area and also finding the most common ‘official’ term used for your topic in journal articles

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• Choose any suitable subject headings• Narrow your scope IF it’s useful • Or keep your words as a free keyword search as you entered them

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• Enter all your synonyms for the first concept – ONE BY ONE • If you have them one separate lines you can combine them • And also take out things you think aren't working without messing up your search

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• You now need to combine your synonyms with ‘OR’ to get everything under one topic referred to by different names

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First concept

Second concept

Third concept

• Now you have three results on your list which represent each concept with a variety of words6, 9 and 13 • You need to combine these to find results on your question - what do we combine these with?

Results!

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You need to have a look and evaluate how relevant the results on the first few pages are

You're using an academic journal database so you don't need to worry too much about authority but you do need to think about

Currency Relevance Objectivity

Now you have results you can limit to full text or limit to a time frame on the left hand side menu

Exercise 1 – PsycInfo

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Synonyms and narrower terms on next slide Use the worksheet if it helps you organise concepts and how to

combine with ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ REMEMBER to select any relevant subject headings REMEMBER alternative UK/US spellings! Grab me for help! If you get to grips with that quickly – try combining narrower terms to

find information on a specific aspect of the research area

Try and do a similar search to find information on offenders AND DSPD AND treatment

Synonyms

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Offender DSPD Treatment

Criminal* “severe personality disorder” Therapy

Inmate* “personality disorder” Programme*

Convict* Program*

“Criminal population” Counselling

“Criminal justice system” Education

Offender DSPD Treatment

“Youth offenders” Violen* “Talk therapy” OR “group therapy”

“Repeat offenders” Sex* “cognitive therapy” OR “behavioural therapy”

“First time offenders” Medicat*

“Violent offenders” “individual treatment plans” OR customise*

HMP “Self management”

Chromis

Boundary management

“After care”

Narrower Terms

Social Sciences Citation Index

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Social SciencesWill take you to the Web of Knowledge platform On here you can also select Sciences Citation Index if

you want to search across both

Social Sciences Citation Index

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Slightly different search screenExample search

Works in a similar way but you should group your concept terms in each box and type ‘OR’ between them (most straightforward way)

Exercise 2 - SSCI

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Have a go – the principle is the same – it’s just the way you input that looks slightly different

We are going to try and find information to answer an essay question “Examine the balance between rights, duties, responsibilities to the public, the offender and the practitioner themselves in discussion of treatment for incarcerated sex offenders.”

3 concepts = sex offenders AND prison AND treatment

Exercise 2 - Tips!

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Now run a few searches and see if you can find 1 thing for an element of the question (no need to record this)

Use the worksheet if it helps you organise concepts and how to combine with ‘AND’ and ‘OR’

Make sure the drop down boxes on the left say ‘AND’ so the three concepts combine to find things about :sex offenders AND prison AND treatment

REMEMBER alternative UK/US spellings! Grab me for help!

Exercise 2 – EXTENSION TASK

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In our previous search we were treating each concept equally – however this question asks you to delve deeper into one – which one?

This means you will repeat your search several times changing the third element – to look in turn at treatment, public safety issues, practitioner safety, and offender rights.

This is quicker than combining them all with OR and looking through 60,000 results – doing 4 or 5 quick searches and picking 1 or 2 results from each will help you answer your question quicker.

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The last element is the one we will change for each mini-search to

answer the whole question

You will need to do a few searches swapping the last element out each time so you cover:

treatment (example: treatment OR therapy OR programme* OR program*) public safety issues, practitioner safety, and offender rights.

Follow the trail - citations

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In the record look for (right hand side)

Google Scholar

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Important – did you know you can set Google Scholar to flag up everything you have paid access to through the University?

Please follow along and personalise your GSGoogle Scholar > settings

Personalising Google Scholar ...

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• Click library links on the left hand side

• Search ‘Middlesex university’ and select ‘Middlesex University – Full Text @ Middlesex’

Searching Google Scholar ...

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• Search ‘crime drug addiction treatment’ • Is there anything you notice about the results?

Searching Google Scholar ...

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One result is a citation – there’s no file but it looks very relevant and I want to know a bit more

Click on ‘Cite’ and copy and paste the full citation into Google The top three results are

from the organisational website .org – should be authoritative

I can download the file, and the follow up report

Several useful sections on treatment

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Evaluating results

Evaluating what you’ve found

Key questionsIs it what you need and is it trustworthy?

What criteria would you use to assess the relevance and quality of the information?

Currency How old is this information? When was it last updated? Is this important for the assignment?

Authority Who is the author? Site creator, organisation, scholarly / peer reviewed journals etc?

Intent What is the purpose of the website / information? e.g. financial gain, academic

Relevance Is this what I need? Will it answer my question? Is it at the right level?

Objectivity Balanced view? Opposing views represented? References?

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Cutting Edge?

Staying up to date in your area

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In the databases we’ve looked at you can set up an account and then set up alerts or RSS feeds for searches you’ve done

Staying up to date – citation alerts

• In Web of Science databases (SSCI and SCI) • For articles particularly significant to your work/dissertation get an alert every time it is cited in new research

Zetoc alerts service – get info as it’s published

44 • Access as you would any of the other databases (MyUnihub)

45 • Create an alert and name it

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• Now add searches or journals to the alert

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• You can build a list of searches – by keywords or author • You can also add searches by journals and be emailed every time a journal is released

Excercise 3 - Zetoc

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Set up some alerts and add searches relevant to your log books for this module

Remember you can add multiple searches for each of the synonyms for your search term to your alert

Grab me if you need a hand or help picking search terms.

Getting Full text of journal articles

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If you’re lucky!It will be available as a PDF on the database (look for PDF symbol)

If you’re not lucky! REMEMBER – it won’t always be directly available to you – especially at MA levelDouble check the library catalogue by copying journal name into the

‘journal search’. If we have it there’ll be a record and a link with the dates we have access to.

Go to Google Scholar and look for PDF signsGo to Author’s website/institution’s repository, often they have left a

pre publisher versionOrder a copy via the inter-library loan service (£3.00) (usually you’ll

be emailed with a link to a PDF)http://unihub.mdx.ac.uk/study/library/resources/ill/index.aspx

Using other libraries

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SCONUL – go to UniHelp with your ID and fill out a form to get a SCONUL card

http://www.cpd25.ac.uk/ - go to ‘search catalogues’ and search to see if the item is available in another University library (You will always need to double check the relevant University’s own library catalogue to check if they have print copies- the only University where you will be able to use their electronic collections is UL Senate House library)

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Attribution

ReferencingIs very importantAcknowledges other people’s work (avoids plagiarism)Shows you’ve read around the subjectSupports your discussion and argumentsGets you better marks!Enables others to find your references

As MA students it would be useful to use a referencing software like RefWorks or Mendeley

Referencing tools

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Refworks is an online site to manage your references subscribed to by the University – you access it like any other database through logging into MyUniHub > My Study > scroll down to ‘My library’ > databases

Mendeley is a free to use Open access website to which you can sign up and store and organise all your references http://www.mendeley.com/

Referencing guidehttp://libguides.mdx.ac.uk/plagiarismreferencing

Library subject guide

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This and other powerpoints and helpsheetsMy contact details – please make appointments with me!

Access via MyUniHub > My study > My library > library subject guides

Need help?

Librarians in the Specialist Zone (1st floor) 11-3 Monday - Friday

Ask a Librarian http://askalibrarian.mdx.ac.uk/Psychology Library Subject Guide - Viv’s contact

details and power points/helpsheets http://libguides.mdx.ac.uk/psy