Find books

^WC = Wellesley College users only.

Wellesley College Library catalog
In addition to books, you will also find journals, videos, and more.

Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
Wellesley College faculty, students, and staff may use Interlibrary Loan and or other Document Delivery services to
borrow or obtain copies of materials not found in Wellesley's collection.

Other nearby library catalogs
Links to other nearby libraries.

WorldCat ^WC
OCLC catalog of books and other materials in libraries worldwide.

CogNet Books ^WC- Over 400 full-text books in cognitive science from The MIT Press are included. on-campus access / off-campus access (search function may not work with off-campus access)

National Academies Press
At the National Academy Press web site, you can search over 3,000 full-text books online for specific subject terms, in order to locate relevant chapters or book titles. Coverage includes subjects like physical sciences, materials science/engineering, environmental issues, and more.

Floor Map of Science Library

Find background information

Encyclopedias, dictionaries, manuals, and handbooks are great resources for research ideas, to get a quick overview of the research that has been done on a topic (and the names of the key researchers), and to find out a definition of an unfamiliar term or field of research.

^WC = Wellesley College users only.

Encyclopedias

AccessScience ^WC
Access to all the articles, fully illustrated, from the latest edition of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, Research Updates from the McGraw-Hill Yearbooks, thousands of illustrations, and the latest Science News® headlines, biographies, 110,000+ definitions from The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, and more.

Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Psychology. Science Reference; HM251 .B476 1995.

Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology ^WC
The Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology encompasses applications of psychological knowledge and procedures in all areas of psychology. The topics included are, but are not limited to, aging (geropsychology), assessment, clinical, cognitive, community, counseling, educational, environmental, family, industrial/organizational, health, school, sports, and transportation psychology.

Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society ^WC
This encyclopedia presents the social and cultural history of childhood from antiquity to the present. Children and Childhood examines this history through articles on education, parenting, child labor, economics, images of childhood, children's literature, play, toys and games, health, physiology, law, the criminal justice system and social welfare. Comparative articles include information about childhood in cultures throughout the world.

Encyclopedia of Creativity. Science Reference; q BF408 .E53 1999.

Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. Science Reference; BF31 .E5 1994.

Encyclopedia of Learning and Memory. Science Reference; q BF318 .E53 1992.

Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology

Encyclopedia of Psychology. Science Reference; q BF31 .E52 2000.

Encyclopedia of Relationships Across the Lifespan. Science Reference; HM 132 .T83 1996.

Encyclopedia of School Psychology

Encyclopedia of Sociology. Clapp Ref HM425 .E5 2000.

Encyclopedia of the Human Brain Science. Science Reference; q QP376 .E59 2002.

Handbook of International School Psychology. Science Reference; LB1027.55 .H357 2007. 

Dictionaries

APA dictionary of Psychology. Science Reference; BF31 .A65 2007 

AccessScience ^WC
110,000+ definitions from The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, and more.

Oxford Reference Online ^WC
Oxford Reference Online contains over 100 dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press.

Manuals and Handbooks

CogNet Reference ^WCis a collection of 7 full-text online reference books. Reference books included: The Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, The Cognitive Neurosciences III , The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks 2e, The Handbook of Multisensory Processes, The Visual Neurosciences, and The MIT Encyclopedia of Communication Disorders. on-campus access / off-campus access (Search function may not work with off-campus access.)

Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders : DSM-IV-TR. Science Reference; RC455.2.C4 D54 2000

Handbook of child psychology. Science Reference; q BF721 .H242 2006

Handbook of Personality Psychology. Science Reference; BF698 .H3345 1997.

Handbook of Psychology. Irving B. Weiner, editor-in-chief. Science Reference; q BF121 .H1955 2003

Handbook of Social Cognition. Science Library; HM132 .H333 1994.

The Neuropsychology Handbook. Science Reference; RC386.6.N48 .N49 1997.

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Find articles and essays

The following databases provide either full-text articles or citations (information about when and where the article was published).
Once you have a citation for an article, use the Find It! @ Wellesley link from each citation to search one or more electronic journal sources through the Wellesley College Library Catalog. Use the name of the journal as the title. If Wellesley does not own the article, you can request it via Interlibrary Loan (ILL).

^WC = Wellesley College users only.

Academic Search Premier
The world’s largest academic multi-disciplinary database, Academic Search Premier provides full text for nearly 4,650 serials, including full text for more than 3,600 peer-reviewed titles.

ERIC ^WC
The Educational Resources Information Center contains annotated references to educational materials issued in the monthly Resources in Education (RIE) and to journal articles issued in the monthly Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE). Contains bibliographic references from the U.S. Department of Education, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and the National Library of Education.

InfoTrac OneFile ^WC (via Infotrac)
Great starting point for scholarly & popular articles in every discipline.

FindArticles (via LookSmart)
Search and read 2.8 million articles from over 500 publications.

Google Scholar
Use Google Scholar to find scholarly literature available across the web, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.

JSTOR ^WC
The JSTOR collection contains full-text articles from several periodicals. This is an archive, and the most recent few years are usually not available on JSTOR.

MEDLINE ^WC (via ISI's Web of Science)
MEDLINE is the premier database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). It contains over 12 million records of journal articles in all areas of the life sciences, with particular emphasis on biomedicine.The articles indexed in MEDLINE were published in more than 4,600 international journals, published in over 30 languages.

Project Muse ^WC
Academic journals in humanities & social sciences. Current 5 years available

PsycINFO ^WC(via EBSCO host)
PsycINFO , from the American Psychological Association (APA), contains nearly 2.3 million citations and summaries of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, all in psychology and related disciplines, dating as far back as the 1800s. Journal coverage, which spans 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 2,100 periodicals in more than 25 languages.

Science Direct ^WC
Full-text articles from several social science periodicals. Access to articles with green icons only. 1995+

Web of Science ^WC
Web of Science at Wellesley consists of the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Humanities Citation Index. Web of Science is very useful in performing interdisciplinary subject searches and citation searches.

If you are having trouble finding search terms for your topic, you may want to consult the Thesaurus of Psychological Indexing Terms in PsycINFO ^WC(paper copy at: Science Ref q Z695.1.P7 T48 2001 ).

Other databases may be useful for you, depending on your specific topic and approach. The Databases A-Z page lists all of the electronic resources and what subjects and timespan they cover.

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Tracing citations

• Use the "cited references" tab for citation searching in PsycINFO.
• Use the Science Citation Index Expanded (1900-present) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (1956-present) in Web of Science ^WC.

Tests and measurements

The Buros Institute of Mental Measurements provides a searchable database for test measures and reviews.

Finding Psychological and Educational Testing Instruments - A help guide from Penn State's Harrisburg Library.

Directory of Unpublished Experimental Mental Measures, v.1/3 (1996)-v.7 (1997) / Goldman, Bert A, Science Reserve q BF431 .G625
Contains information on nonstandardized experimental test instruments. Each entry includes the following: test name, purpose, description, statistics, validity, author, and source. Indexes allow the reader to locate test instruments by author or subject.

Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Attitudes / edited by John P. Robinson, Phillip R. Shaver, and Lawrence S. Wrightsman, Science Reserve BF698.4 .M38 1991
Lists brief descriptions of tests, their purposes, past population samples, validity and reliability information, and lists of references. Includes sample questions from, or copies of, measures and scoring instructions.

The Mental Measurements Yearbook, Highland Park, N.J., Science Reserve q Z5814.P8 R93
Includes timely, consumer-oriented test reviews, providing evaluative information to promote and encourage informed test selection. Typical MMY test entries include descriptive information, one or two professional reviews, and an extensive list of references to pertinent literature. To be reviewed in the MMY a test must be commercially available, be published in the English language, and be new, revised, or widely used since it last appeared in the MMY series.

Tests in Print VII: an index to tests, test reviews, and the literature on specific tests / edited by Linda L. Murphy, Science Reserve q Z5814.E9 T47 2006. Tests in Print (TIP) is an index to tests which have been reviewed in the Mental Measurements Yearbooks, and are currently available from publishers.

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APA Format for Research Papers

We recommend the following three sources:

1. Citing print sources:
We recommend consulting the book:
Publication manual of the American Psychological Association APA standard format, 5th ed, BF76.7 .P83 2001.
There are 2 copies on Reserve in the Science Library and one copy in Clapp Reference.   

Note: The following are not "official" APA sources, but many students find them helpful:
APA Style Essentials
Using APA Format
Bibliography Styles Handbook

2. Citing electronic sources:
see APA Style Electronic References.

NOTE! If you cite a journal article from a database, you must acknowledge that you read the article in electronic form (as opposed to reading the actual article in print). Here is an example:

Borman, W. C., Hanson, M. A., Oppler, S. H., Pulakos, E. D., & White, L. A. (1993). Role of early supervisory experience in supervisor performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 78, 443-449. Retrieved October 23, 2000, from PsycARTICLES database.

3. APA Style Format for an Annotated Bibliography:
see APA Format for Annotated Bibliographies

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Science research in the news

Here are a few Internet news sources that reference current research in psychology and other sciences.

APA Online - Psychology in the News

EurekAlert - News service from the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Nature Online

NewScientist Online

Science Online

ScienceDaily

ScienceNews Online

Scientific American Online

Contact the departmental Library liaison

Contact: Neil Nero, library research liaison to Psychology 

Contact: Deborah Lenares, library collections liaison to Psychology

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Go to related Wellesley College academic departments

Psychology Department

Cognitive Sciences

Biology Department

Neuroscience

Sociology Department

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Return to Research Guides by Subject

Wellesley College Library • WCIS • Neil Nero • last modified: March 10, 2008