RLT Planning Research

Modified: 2008-09-05

GETTING AN IDEA

YOUR RESEARCH PLAN

AN EXAMPLE LITERATURE SEARCH

ADVANTAGES OF A LITERATURE SEARCH

ACCESSING THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE IN PSYCHOLOGY

Use:

http://library.tamut.edu/ElectronicResources/DatabaseResources.htm

Then, click on: PsycINFO

to access.

The more commonly used PsycINFO fields are marked with an asterisk (*).

Thesaurus

PsycINFO Search Example

"depth of processing" and "face". (We use quotes here to illustrate the exact search terms we typed. In PsycINFO, you would type the word(s) without quotes.)

Conduct a PsycINFO search and enter your results in the spaces provided:

Search Term

Our hits

 Your hits (2006-01-27)

Your hits (2008-09-05) Illumina vendor

Your hits (2008) EBSCOhost vendor

depth of processing

283

 1052

1413

 313

face

27,268

 23,789

46,866

 40,218

face and depth of processing

16

 34

203

 19

PsycINFO Operators: OR, AND, PRE/n, W/n and AND NOT

Citation List and How it was Culled

We cut down our list of 16 hits to 10 that were directly relevant to our topic.

Organizing the Abstracts and Articles

 

Figure 11.1 Facsimile of pages from PsycINFO

You will make a similar notebook for your research idea. Look at the example notebook I will pass around in class.

In the Know: When discussing research literature, psychologists used the author(s) last name(s) and the date of publication as a kind of shorthand to identify the article.

NEW RESEARCH IDEAS

Brainstorming: A few semesters ago, my class came up with the following research ideas related to "depth of processing" and "face"

Table 11.2 Focus-Group Generated Research Ideas

  • Eyewitness and facial recognition by race
    • Inspired by Anthony, Copper, and Mullen (1992), several students wished to investigate the effect of cross&endash;racial facial identification.
  • The effect of emotion or trauma on recall of faces
    • One student wondered how emotion or trauma might affect facial recognition and depth of processing. She speculated that under high levels of emotion, facial recognition would be better under both shallow and deep processing.
  • Matching adult faces to childhood photographs
    • A mother wondered whether strangers could match photos of children's faces with their corresponding adult faces.
  • Recognizing strangers who are regularly seen in a variety of settings
    • People seen in particular contexts are easily recognized. However, recognizing the same people outside of their usual context is more difficult. Does level of processing make a difference?
  • Memory for faces by attractiveness and gender
    • Some wondered if attractive people are more easily recognized and whether there is a gender effect.
  • Recognizing passersby riding in automobiles
    • In many rural areas, drivers wave at other drivers who are traveling the oncoming lane. One student commented that this characteristic made for a field experiment in which drivers self&endash;selected themselves into wavers and non&endash;wavers.
  • Recognizing familiar people in unfamiliar automobiles
    • In small towns, residents learn to associate autos with their owners. One student proposed to have people drive around in their own cars and later in rental cars and to count the number of waves they received from other drivers.
  • Effect of frequency and duration of exposure on facial recognition memory
    • A student wondered whether frequency of exposure to the same face or the length of time a face was seen would affect recognition in both shallow and deep processing.

OTHER SOURCES OF INFORMATION

MAKING PERSONAL CONTACT

Note: For newer references, PsycINFO will supply the e-mail of the first author!

To illustrate a search for an e-mail address, we chose the article by Coin and Tiberghien (1997) (Citation #3 in Table 11.1). We picked this particular article because it looked difficult. According to PsycINFO, the first author, Christian Coin, was from Universite Claude Bernard in Lyons, France. Using a search engine, we found that the URL for the school was:


http://www.univ-lyon1.fr/ucbl/


Naturally, that page was in French! We could not find a directory, nor could we find a link for the Institut de Sciences Cognitives which was Coin’s academic unit listed in PsycINFO. Using “Christian Coin” in a search engine did not pan out either, even when combined with “Claude Bernard,” his institution. At this point we switched tactics and searched for the second author “Guy Tiberghien.” We were successful. We found a page with his e-mail address on it. Tiberghien’s address was:


tiberghien@isc.cnrs.fr

Based on his e-mail address we tried the following server:

www.isc.cnrs.fr

The mail server’s name was isc.cnrs.fr, so by adding www to it, we got www.isc.cnrs.fr


That URL turned out to be the home page of the Institut des Sciences Cognitives. The Institut’s page had a directory, listed in French as “membres,” but Christian Coin was not listed. We inferred that Coin might have been a student when he published the article in 1997, and had since moved away. We e-mailed Guy Tiberghien and he replied a few days later and provided Coin's e-mail address, which was:

cio-amberieu@ac-lyon.fr

Using his e-mail address to once again deduce a Web home page, we found:

http://www.ac-lyon.fr


and that turned out to be the Academie de Lyon in Lyon, France, naturellement.


As noted, we picked this citation because it was not in the United States and not in English. Still, in less than 10 minutes, we discovered that one of the authors was still at the same university and we found his and his co-author’s e-mail address. Not bad detective work, if we say so ourselves. Fortunately, PsycINFO is now providing e-mail addresses for authors, making the job of communicating with the authors of recent articles much easier.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROSPECTUS

THE COMPLETED PROSPECTUS

GLOSSARY

abstract--Short summary of an article or the contents of a book.

citation--The author(s), publication date, title, journal or publisher, and pages of an article or book.

database--An organized collection of information.

field--A place in a database to store a particular type of information.

hit--A record that matches a set of search criteria.

literature--The entire collection of published research in a scientific discipline.

operator--Terms that aid searching such as OR, AND, PRE/n, W/n, and AND NOT (PsycINFO examples).

prospectus--A detailed plan for a research project.

record--All database fields about an item such as an article or book.

replication--The repetition of a scientific procedure in order to confirm the original results.

search engine--Computer program that allows users to search a database or the World Wide Web.

search term--Word or phrase used in a search engine to find a record or URL.

thesaurus--Words or phrases that are similar to the target word or phrase.

URL--Uniform resource locator; a web address that consists of a protocol such as http or ftp and a domain name.

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