Resource Guides: Psychology: Find Articles

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How to read scholarly articles

How to read scholarly articles
"While books are undoubtedly fabulous resources, you will find shorter, specific, scholarly works in academic journals. Essays in academic journals are essentially reports that scholars write to their peers—present and future—about what they’ve done in their research, what they’ve found, and why they think it’s important. Thus, in a lot of fields they often have a structure reminiscent of the lab reports you’ve written for science classes"

How to read a scholarly article

OpenURL Linker

Use OpenURL to request articles when full text is not available.

Click the OpenURL icon adjacent to the database search results to locate an electronic or print article.
If article not available online (in a different database) or in print (in the library), click Submit an Interlibrary Loan Request to request a copy.
If you are not a registered user, click First Time User and complete the form.
You will receive a link to the electronic article (pdf) by e-mail in 3-5 working days.

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Find articles & database assistance

APA PsycINFO This link opens in a new window Index to the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines, including medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, and other areas. Coverage includes references and abstracts to over 1,300 journals in more than 20 languages, and to book chapters and books in the English language. The database includes information from empirical studies, case studies, surveys, bibliographies, literature reviews, discussion articles, conference reports and dissertations. Updated weekly. *PsycINFO contains all full text content from PsycARTICLES*
PsycARTICLES This link opens in a new window PsycARTICLES™ is a database of full-text articles from 53 psychology journals published by the American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association, and Hogrefe & Huber. The database includes all material from the print journals with the exception of ads and editorial board lists. The database is updated daily.
NIH Public Access This link opens in a new window The NIH Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication. To help advance science and improve human health, the Policy requires that these papers are accessible to the public on PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication.
PubMed This link opens in a new window Developed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed is a major medical database. It provides access to bibliographic/abstracting information from MEDLINE, plus out-of-scope citations from certain MEDLINE journals; citations that precede the date that a journal was selected for MEDLINE indexing; and some additional life science journals that submit full-text and receive a qualitative review by NLM. Included are links to many sites with full-text articles.
ScienceDirect This link opens in a new window ScienceDirect is a full-text collection of journals on science, technology, and medicine published by Elsevier. The University of Maine System Libraries have access to Complete and the Freedom Collection, which together comprise more than 1,800 journals, most with backfiles from 1995 to present. There are some ScienceDirect journal titles to which University users do not have access. Elsevier provides lists of titles included and excluded from the Freedom Collection at http://www.info.sciencedirect.com/licensing/additional/freedom/
CogPrints Electronic Archive This link opens in a new window Searchable electronic archive of full-text papers in all areas of psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics, as well as computer science, philosophy, biology, medicine, anthropology, and any other areas of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition. Includes pre-prints and reprints from published journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and personal collections.
CQ Researcher This link opens in a new window Explores a single hot issue in the news in depth each week. Topics range from social and teen issues to environment, health, education and science and technology. There are 44 reports produced each year including four expanded reports.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Credo Reference has 3.2 million entries from more than 450 encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, guides, and atlases in all fields. Sources are selected from major publishers, such as Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Greenwood, Penguin, Routledge, Sage, Thames and Hudson, Wiley, and more. Bangor Public Library provides access via its in-house workstations.
Psychiatry Online -- Includes DSM-V This link opens in a new window Psychiatry Online is a searchable full text database that includes the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Library (DSM) Library, scholarly journals, and textbooks published by the American Psychiatry Association.

General resources for finding articles

Academic Search Ultimate This link opens in a new window
CQ Researcher This link opens in a new window Explores a single hot issue in the news in depth each week. Topics range from social and teen issues to environment, health, education and science and technology. There are 44 reports produced each year including four expanded reports.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window Credo Reference has 3.2 million entries from more than 450 encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, guides, and atlases in all fields. Sources are selected from major publishers, such as Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Greenwood, Penguin, Routledge, Sage, Thames and Hudson, Wiley, and more. Bangor Public Library provides access via its in-house workstations.
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Using this link for Google Scholar allows you access to the library's subscription resources through the "Full Text @ My Library" link. Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window JSTOR is a digital archive of more than 1,000 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, some dating from the 19th century. JSTOR's moving wall policy means there is often a gap from 1-5 years between the most recently published issue and the date of the most recent issue available in JSTOR.
Points of View Reference Source This link opens in a new window Points of View Reference Source covers hundreds of topics, each with an Overview (objective background/description), Point (argument) and Counterpoint (opposing argument). Each topic also features a Guide to Critical Analysis which helps the reader evaluate the controversy and enhances students’ ability to read critically, develop their own perspective on the issues, and write or debate an effective argument on the topic.
New York Times Historical This link opens in a new window The Historical New York Times (1851 to 4 years ago) offers searchable full text, with full page and article images (PDF). This resource includes articles, reviews, advertisements, comics, photos, maps and graphics, editorials, letters, and obituaries. For current full text of the New York Times, use one of the following links: LexisNexis Academic, ProQuest Newspapers, or the New York Times.
Oxford English Dictionary Online This link opens in a new window The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. It traces the usage of words through 2.5 million quotations from a wide range of international English language sources, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.
Project MUSE This link opens in a new window Indexes and provides full-text access to more than 400 journals from 100 not-for-profit scholarly publishers. Project MUSE covers the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and many others. University of Maine at Augusta subscribes to the Basic College Collection.

ProCon.org The Pros and Cons of controversial issues. The mission statement at ProCon.org is: "Promoting critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan, and primarily pro-con format."
ResearchGate Google Scholar often finds these articles, too.
CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) Education ...a valuable resource offering students and educators free supplemental content on complex global affairs and foreign policy issues. Our extensive library, grounded in best pedagogical practices and expert insights, equips students with the knowledge, skills, and perspective necessary to navigate today's most critical global challenges.

There are four specialist repository search engines. There is much overlap between these services, and at present (2019) it is not clear which is best. They are:

BASE (possibly particularly good for material from continental Europe)
CORE
OAIster (via WorldCat)

Directory of Open Access Journals This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text articles from over 1145 free peer-reviewed journals covering all scholarly and scientific subjects. Over 310 journals can be searched by article title. Most articles are in English. Records for articles in foreign languages have English abstracts.

OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories)
OpenDOAR is the quality-assured global directory of academic open access repositories. It enables the identification, browsing and search for repositories, based on a range of features, such as location, software or type of material held.
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OpenDOAR has opted to collect and provide information solely on sites that wholly embrace the concept of open access to full text resources that are of use to academic researchers. Thus sites where any form of access control prevents immediate access are not included: likewise sites that consist of metadata records only are also declined.
Scientific Data's Recommended Data Repositories
Repositories included on this page have been evaluated to ensure that they meet our requirements for data access, preservation and stability. Please be aware, however, that some repositories on this page may only accept data from those funded by specific sources, or may charge for hosting data.
Open Access Directory (OAD) Disciplinary repositories
The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large.
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This is a list of OA disciplinary repositories (also called central or subject repositories). Unless otherwise noted, they accept relevant deposits regardless of the author's institutional affiliation.
This list includes both preprint and postprint repositories.
Some recommended repositories
From Sotheby's Institute of Art Libraries - some (mostly) UK sites.

These browser extension help you located full-text articles online.

Aaron Tay writes about various topics related to librarianship and electronic resources.
"Aaron Tay is currently Library Analytics Manager, Singapore Management University and before that was E-services Facilitator, Senior Librarian at the National University of Singapore Libraries."

Academic related browser extensions : Browser extensions (Scite/Scholarcy)and improvements to Zotero
This has a great introduction to the most popular browser extensions as well as a discussion of the three mentioned in the title of the article.

A comparison of 6 Access Broker browser extensions Lean Library, Kopernio, Anywhere Access, Libkey Nomad & more
This is a great (but long) discussion of browser extensions to find full-text articles.

CINAHL Plus Full Text tutorial
This video provides an overview of searching the CINAHL Plus Full Text database.
CINAHL includes journals on allied health and nursing subjects.

**Click on DATABASES, not Find Articles, on the Libraries' homepage.

Peer-Review and Evaluating Articles

What does Peer-Reviewed mean?

A scholarly periodical requires that each article submitted for publication be judged by an independent panel of experts (scholarly or scientific peers). Articles not approved by a majority of these peers are not accepted for publication by the journal. Peer-reviewed articles are generally considered to be scholarly and reliable resources.

Peer-Review Process Explained:

How do I tell the difference between scholarly articles, popular articles, and trade articles?

From the University of Maine at Farmington: Guide to identifying scholarly sources

	Scholarly Journals	Magazines	Professional / Trade Journals
Written by	scholars / researchers	journalists	journalists / industry experts
Written for	professors, students	general public	people who work in that field
Looks like	mostly text, may have charts & graphs	glossy covers, many advertisements, & photographs	glossy covers & industry specific ads
Articles	contains original search/analysis usually signed by the author long articles written in scholarly/technical lang. contain bibliographies peer-reviewed	info about current events, trends, pop culture not always signed by the author short articles written for general reader no bibliographies not peer-reviewed	report on industry news & trends not always signed by author short articles written in tech lang. specific to industry may be bibliographies could be peer-reviewed
Examples	Studies in Short Fiction Journal of Chemical Education	Time * Newsweek Ladies Home Journal	RN * Accounting Review Library Journal

Database search assistance

Subject Terms, Thesauri, and Controlled Vocabularies
PsycINFO

Requesting articles from other libraries

1. Look for articles.
To get the full-text article for "Risk Factors for Eating Disorders," click on the Full Text Online link.

2. To get more information on the article "Eating Disorders," click on the title OR "Citation Online."

3. To request the article, click "REQUEST."

4. Then click "Request this Article."

5. Sign in or create account.

6. Fill out any information still needed on the form. Click "Submit Request."

7. Your request has been submitted.

8. You will be notified of the status of your request by email.

9. Copy the given password, click on the link, and paste the password into the form. You will be prompted to save the file.

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