Covers planning your search, useful tips, and takes you through searching PsycInfo, Social Sciences Citation Index, and personalising Google Scholar. Also looks at Zetoc alerts for staying up to date in your research area.

1. PSY4018
Literature searching /
finding journal information

2. Aims & Outcomes
 Planning your searching
 Introduction to searching different databases
Psycinfo
Web of Knowledge
Google Scholar
 How to set up alerts on your interest/research areas
Zetoc
 Evaluating what you find
 Where to find referencing information
2

3. Housekeeping
 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?
3

4. Preparation
4

5. Planning your search - keywords
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 concepts
 Illegal 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
5

6. Keywords
 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’)
6
 Examples follow

7. • Criminal* •“Youth offenders”
• Offender* •“Repeat offenders”
• Convict* •“First time offenders”
crime • “Criminal population”
•“Violent offenders”
• Inmate*
• “Criminal justice system” HMP
• Opiates
• “Psychotropic
What research has • “Substance abuse”drugs”
been conducted on • “Illicit drugs” •“Prescription
the use of therapy Drug drugs”
• “Illegal drugs” • Specific drug
for offenders who addiction • “addictive names ... Prozac,
take drugs?
substances” cannabis, crack
cocaine, heroin etc
• “Talk therapy”
• Treatment* • “Behavioural therapy” OR
• Programme* CBT OR “Behavioral
therapy OR Program* therapy”
• Medicat*
• Counsel* • “Family Therapy”
• “residential therapy” OR
rehab*

8. Synonyms
Offender DSPD Treatment
Criminal* “severe personality disorder” Therapy
Inmate* “personality disorder” Programme*
Convict* Program*
“Criminal population” Counselling
“Criminal justice system” Education
Narrower Terms
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
8 “After care”

9. Useful clues/things to pick up on
 Literature searching is a cycle – you will often need to improve your
search / play around with a few different searches
 Search strategies
 Citation – you follow leads from useful articles, books and reading
lists
 Expanding 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
question
 e.g. randomized trials; publication date; empirical study; English
language; type of drug; type of offender (race/age/crime)
9

10. Get better results & find things quicker
 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”
10

11. Searching
11

12. General principles of searching
Volunteer please!
12 http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/elearning/learn/topic/gamenesting/index.php

13. PsycInfo
 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
13

14. Getting into the databases....
REMEMBER!
Always use MyUniHub
as a gateway to library
resources
14

15. 15

16. 16

18. • 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
18

19. • 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
19

20. • 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
20

21. • 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
21

22. • You now need to combine your synonyms with ‘OR’ to get everything under
one topic referred to by different names
22

23. First concept
Second concept
Third concept
• Now you have three results on your list which represent each concept with a
variety of words
6, 9 and 13
• You need to combine these to find results on your question - what do we
23 combine these with?

24. Results!
 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
24

25. Exercise 1 – PsycInfo
Try and do a similar search to find information on
offenders AND DSPD AND treatment
 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
25

26. Synonyms
Offender DSPD Treatment
Criminal* “severe personality disorder” Therapy
Inmate* “personality disorder” Programme*
Convict* Program*
“Criminal population” Counselling
“Criminal justice system” Education
Narrower Terms
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
26 “After care”

27. Social Sciences Citation Index
 Social Sciences
 Will take you to the Web of Knowledge platform
 On here you can also select Sciences Citation Index if
you want to search across both
27

28. Social Sciences Citation Index
 Slightly different search screen
 Example search
 Works in a similar way but you should group your concept
terms in each box and type ‘OR’ between them (most
28 straightforward way)

29. Exercise 2 - SSCI
 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
29

30. Exercise 2 - Tips!
 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!
30

31. Exercise 2 – EXTENSION TASK
 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.
31

32. 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,
32 and offender rights.

33. Follow the trail - citations
 In the record look for (right hand side)
33

34. Google Scholar
 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 GS
 Google Scholar > settings
34

35. Personalising Google Scholar ...
• Click library links on the left
hand side
• Search ‘Middlesex
university’ and select
‘Middlesex University – Full
Text @ Middlesex’
35

36. Searching Google Scholar ...
• Search ‘crime drug addiction treatment’
• Is there anything you notice about the results?
36

37. Searching Google Scholar ...
 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
37

38. 38
Evaluating results

39. Evaluating what you’ve found
Key questions
Is it what you need and is it trustworthy?
What criteria would you use to assess the
relevance and quality of the information?

40.  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?

41. Cutting Edge?
41

42. Staying up to date in your area
 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
42

43. 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

44. Zetoc alerts service – get info as it’s published
44 • Access as you would any of the other databases (MyUnihub)

45. 45
• Create an alert and name it

46. • Now add searches or journals to the alert
46

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

48. Excercise 3 - Zetoc
 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.
48

49. Getting Full text of journal articles
 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 level
 Double 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 signs
 Go to Author’s website/institution’s repository, often they
have left a pre publisher version
 Order 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
49

50. Using other libraries
 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)
50

51. Attribution
51

52. Referencing
 Is very important
 Acknowledges other people’s work (avoids plagiarism)
 Shows you’ve read around the subject
 Supports your discussion and arguments
 Gets 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

53. Referencing tools
 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
53 references http://www.mendeley.com/

54. Referencing guide
http://libguides.mdx.ac.uk/plagiarismreferencing

55. Library subject guide
 This and other powerpoints and helpsheets
 My contact details – please make appointments with me!
55 Access via MyUniHub > My study > My library > library subject guides

56. 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