Modified: 2008-09-05
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
|
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:
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:
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.