I assume that Annual Review of Psychology and other Review sources are important tools... but HOW DO (and should) students use these tools? Does PsychInfo help or hinder?
Case in point:
Fredrickson and Roberts 1997 on Objectification Theory is cited... and turns out to be an article in Psychology of Women Quarterly --which we have online (it's a CUP journal), but only from 2000. So the student has the immediate problem of ILL...So the problem seems to be as much how to fish around in resources (and how to decode imperfectly formatted/reported bibliography) as how to do the original searching.another: cites Fredrickson and Twenge, incompletely (turns out to be Fredrickson, B. L., Roberts, T., Noll, S. M., Quinn, D. M. & Twenge, J. M. (in press). That swimsuit becomes you: Sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology... which Periodical Finder says is in Ovid/PsychInfo, but the link doesn't work... turns out to be 75(1):269-284, July 1998, but I had to look in several places. I WAS able to get the full text, though.
Annual Reviews:
a search for 'twenge' in FULL TEXT getsThe problem of tracing forward from a pre-1990 [classic] article to find its subsequent citers arises repeatedly [14 times...] in the list of articles. Sometimes there's a hint of where to look (viz: Sex Roles is mentioned for a couple of them, but without anything specific about which issue, just a year...), but in other instances it's not clear if the reference is to an article or a chapter in a book...GENDER IN PSYCHOLOGY...but this doesn't reference the 1998 article, and the ISI link for the 1997 article dead-ends because we don't have access to the Social Psych side of WoS... all a bit frustrating.
Abigail J. Stewart, Christa McDermott
Annual Review of Psychology. Volume 55, Page 519-544, 4 February 2004
Gender is increasingly understood as defining a system of power relations embedded in other power relations. Psychological research on gender-which has most often focused on analysis of sex differences, within-sex variability, and gender roles-has begun...
"...other articles by Claude Steel and colleagues" is a bit of a problem... google is as much help as anything, though there are multiple 'claude steel' refs that aren't psychological... ("claude steel" stereotype does get 17 hits...)
So once again: the reigning problem is how to outfox insufficient specificities, and it's certainly a VALUABLE skill to develop.
"see James and Olson 2000" is another conundrum. janes olson 2000 jeer in google DID get me what I wanted
As so often before, I observe that we have as much a linguistic problem as a conceptual one...
Another: PsychInfo tells me that Vrommen is represented in ONE citation
de Gelder, Beatrice; Vrommen, Jean; Pourtois, Gilles.
Seeing cries and hearing smiles: Crossmodal perception of emotional expressions.
[Chapter] Aschersleben, Gisa (Ed); Bachmann, Talis (Ed); et al. (1999).
Cognitive contributions to the perception of spatial and temporal events.
Advances in psychology, 129. (pp. 425-438). xiii, 460pp.
--a Dutch publication which Annie tells me we don't have. ILL again. And the task of figuring out the literature AROUND this one citation, previous and antecedent to, is thorny --not in WoS, of course, and 'vrommen' isn't in Annual Reviews either. And I did a quick search in SocSciCitation and didn't find the oeuvre listed...
29 June
And what about the various materials in the SCI REF collection, the Handbooks and Encyclopedias? How can we expand their use and utility? Here's a list of Handbooks in the Science Library, another for Encyclopedias, and a census of BF titles added, 2002-June 2004.
30 June
And how does PubMed (and its avatars) fit into Psych? Pretty well, I'd say:
A search for 'twenge' gets 11 hits, one the swimsuit article (1998), and the Link Out takes us directly to the Ovid-sourced full text.There's nothing for 'vrommen'
there's the Related Articles feature as another powerful tool, but what's its algorithm? A Google search leads to an answer:
Words from the abstract of a document are classified as text words. Words from titles are also classified as text words, but words from titles are added in a second time to give them a small advantage in the local weighting scheme. MeSH terms are placed in a third category, and a MeSH term with a subheading qualifier is entered twice, once without the qualifier and once with it. If a MeSH term is starred (indicating a major concept in a document), the star is ignored. These three categories of words (or phrases in the case of MeSH) comprise the representation of a document. No other fields, such as Author or Journal, enter into the calculations.There are some edges: Roedinger gets no hits, and Psychonomic Bulletin is only represented by 5 articles total... and Chiroro and Valentine 1995 is missing, but
Newell FN, Chiroro P, Valentine T.
Recognizing unfamiliar faces: the effects of distinctiveness and view.
Q J Exp Psychol A. 1999 May;52(2):509-34.
is there ...and Related Articles finds 20 others on face recognition. PubMed doesn't necessarily know what WE have, so it's necessary to do a search for whether a title is available --via Annie, Periodical Finder, etc.
As for Annual Reviews: a search for "labeling of emotion" in full text got 4 hits, all from ARPsych... 1951 to 2004
2 July
Dave Elmes offers this link to Vivisimo for twenge ("I usually tell my students about the search engine, Vivisimo, because it will categorize things into various parts. It is good for researcher's names,because it will list journal articles separately...")
3 July
PubMed Central has a substantial amount of fulltext content that's relevant to Psych, and should be in the suite of find-it tools. The suite itself might benefit from presentation as a DIAGRAM, perhaps taking off from the one Dick discovered ...worth a thought, anyway. I want to get them to think of multiple things they can combine to build networks of interlinkage, and a single (hot-linked) graphic summary of process and possibilities would help a lot.
6 July
CrossRef enriches things considerably (see explanation for details), particularly in Annual Reviews. From the FullText of an Annual Review of Psychology article, one has the opportunity to do a "Quick Search" in AR, in PubMed, or in CrossRef for specified terms, or for other mentions of the author. Thus, if I choose 'saccade' and 'eye field' and use CrossRef, I get 149 hits from the 9 current participating publishers --which include Nature, Wiley, Blackwell, OUP... and others. This is a pretty big step, and can be expected to proliferate. "The purpose of the Pilot, which will run during 2004, is to determine the value to the scholarly community of a free, federated, full-text, interdisciplinary, interpublisher search focussed on the peer-reviewed scholarly literature."
Indeed.
See Scitation ("the online home of more than 100 journals from AIP, APS, ASCE, ASME, SPIE, and a host of other prestigious science and engineering societies") for a clear explanation of general functionality. See OUP's [oddly-labeled] entrypoint for CrossRef searching, which seems to include HighWire titles. Also try the CrossRef search pilot directly...
7 July
Exchange with Wythe about
Craik, F.I.M., and Salthouse, T.A.
The Handbook of Aging and Cognition. (2nd ed.)
L. Erlbaum Assoc. c2000
which we have in a NetLibrary e-version... use of which needs to be demonstrated in 250, since more and more resources will be available in this form.
2 September
There's a lot to wedge into my [45-minute] appearance on 23ix, so I need to create a GUIDE to cover lots of things that I won't have time to say. Many of them are my perennials, but they don't seem to get said by others, so I have to include them. Question is: how to actually get these things before students in an efficient way?
Here's the skeleton of Basic Ideas:
The overall question: How is the Information you need (which tends to be citations to literature) hidden (i.e., stored, indexed, encapsulated...)?6 September
- 'Finding stuff' is always fundamentally a lexical problem: there are disciplinary conventions and shibboleths, specialized bits of language, accepted community practises in communication... and nobody is born knowing how to negotiate their complexities. You pick it up as you go along.
- The REAL problem is not finding (there are many ways to do that), but figuring out sensible strategies for what to do with what you find. This is the Perpetual Problem of Bibliography, which I can summarize as KFTF ("Keeping Found Things Found"), but unpack to include how to collect, save, store, search, and repurpose the found things --which may be URLs and citations for articles, chapters in books, theses... and perhaps datasets and other collections of information that don't fit within these labels. Each person pretty much has to figure out --personally-- an efficient and effective solution for management of this gallimaufry of information resources. But the process of figuring out starts with recognizing the problem, and realizing that it WILL get worse with every search you do, every article you read, every experiment you carry out...
And you need to become familiar with APA Style: see a Guide prepared by Dick Grefe, and APA's recommendations on citing electronic resources. Note also the APA's Style Helper ($34.95), and consider acquiring a professional tool for managing your bibliographic resources: EndNote or ProCite, which offer filters for managing citation downloads from PsychInfo and other databases (see GWU's upgrading EndNote to APA 5th edition) --student edition of EndNote is about $100, but it could be very valuable if you foresee a career in psychology. ProCite ("your Information Toolbox") is the higher-priced spread (about twice the price), with greater power.
- There IS no single source that "has everything": you ALWAYS have to search in multiple places, using various interfaces and coping with multiple formats, and with a continual supply of conundrums --problems to solve because of differences in format, conventions, etc. And you ALWAYS need to be conscious of the vocabulary you are building as you explore a topic: it will quickly move from a list of terms to a network of concepts, and YOU need to become an active manager of your own stable of interlinked concepts.
- PsychInfo is a primary tool, but emphatically NOT the only tool for work in psychology. Its conventions, peculiarities, and limitations need to be understood and appreciated. Among these is the (default) mapping of Term to Subject Heading; another is the vexing question of what to do about dissertations, which often decorate search results.
Yale has nice set of instructions for the same Ovid package we use; Harvard has another, in tutorial form- Among the other search tools to consider:
- Annual Reviews (and other Review materials)
- Web of Science (especially for 'who-has-cited' searches, though coverage of psych is uneven)
- PubMed/Medline has a LOT of psych-related coverage
- APA journals publish a lot of stuff
- Scirus via Vivisimo (a beta, but quite useful)
- various publisher sites: HighWire Press, ScienceDirect, others...
- There are several ways to GET the full text of sources found via various search strategies, and there's a reasonable sequence for the alternative methods:
- do we have at at W&L? ==> search Annie, check W&L Periodical Finder
- do somebody provide free access? ==> try HighWire, PubMed links, JSTOR
- request by InterLibrary Loan --but recognize what you are asking by filling out an ILL request.
Encyclopedia of human behavior
San Diego, CA : Academic Press, 1994.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF31 .E5 1994.Encyclopedia of psychology
Washington, D.C. : Oxford University Press, 2000.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF31 .E52 2000.The Corsini encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science
New York : Wiley, c2001.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF31 .E52 2001.Roeckelein, Jon E.
Dictionary of theories, laws, and concepts in psychology
Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1998.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF31 .R625 1998.Handbook of research methods in experimental psychology
Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2003.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF76.5 .H35 2003.Publication manual of the American Psychological Association.
Washington, DC : American Psychological Association, c2001.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF76.7 .P83 2001.Handbook of psychology
Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley, c2003.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF121 .H1955 2003.Steven's handbook of experimental psychology
New York : John Wiley & Sons, c2002.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF181 .H336 2002.Encyclopedia of cognitive science
London ; New York : Nature Pub. Group, 2003.
SCIENCE REFERENCE BF311 .E53 2003.