Contents:

• Ideas for choosing a topic
• Find books
• Find background information
• Encyclopedias
• Dictionaries
• Manuals and Handbooks
• Find articles & essays
• Tracing citations
• Tests and measurements
• APA format for research papers
• Science research in the news

Offcampus Access Databases A-Z Research Guides by Subject | by Course Reference Books Online Library Catalog

• Discuss your topic ideas with your course Professor.
• Schedule a research consultation with a Reference Librarian at the Science Library.
• There are subject encyclopedias, dictionaries, and handbooks for most topics or subject areas. See Find background information.
• Sometimes it is helpful to state your topic idea as a question.
• Example: "Does smell play a part in the evolution of mate selection in humans?"
• Identify the main concepts or keywords: "smell", "evolution", and "mate selection"
• Diagram your sentence and underline the keywords, to help you visualize your topic.
• Make a list of synonyms underneath each keyword. For example:
  
  

  Smell	Evolution	Mate Selection
  Olfaction	Adaptation (Biology)	Mating
  Pheromones	Behavior Evolution	Mating behavior
  Sex Attractants - MESH term	Behavior Genetics	Sexual Selection
  Odor	Natural Selection	Courtship
  Odour (British spelling)	Human Genetics	Sexual behavior in animals

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
OCLC catalog of books and other materials in libraries worldwide.

CogNet Books - 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

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.

Encyclopedias

AccessScience
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.

Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology
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
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 Multicultural Psychology

Encyclopedia of School Psychology

Dictionaries

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

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

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

Manuals and Handbooks

CogNet Referenceis 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

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).

Academic Search Complete
Academic Search Complete is the world's most valuable and comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text database, with more than 6,100 full-text periodicals, including more than 5,100 peer-reviewed journals.

ERIC
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 (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
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 (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
Academic journals in humanities & social sciences. Current 5 years available

PsycINFO (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
Full-text articles from several social science periodicals. Access to articles with green icons only. 1995+

Web of Science
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 (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.

• 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.

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.

• Publication manual of the American Psychological Association - Clapp Reference/Science Reference/Science Reserve BF76.7 .P83 2001
• Concise rules of APA style - Clapp Reference/Science Reference BF76.7 .C66 2005
• APA Formatting and Style Guide (Purdue)
• APA Quick Citation Guide (Penn State)
• APA Format for Annotated Bibliographies (Lesley)
• APA Format for Annotated Bibliographies

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:

Cooper, M., Krull, J., Agocha, V., Flanagan, M., Orcutt, H., Grabe, S., et al. (2008, August). Motivational pathways to alcohol use and abuse among Black and White
         adolescents. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 117(3), 485-501. Retrieved September 30, 2008, doi:10.1037/a0012592

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

Wellesley College Library · WCIS · Neil Nero · last modified: September 4, 2009