Under “H” in the Library of Congress headings, you are likely to find more general coverage of the social sciences (e.g., Dictionary of the Social Sciences; Calhoun, 2002) and coverage of topics traditionally found in sociology. For example, HM-HQ includes important sources of attitudes such as the Gallup Poll Cumulative Index: Public Opinion 1998–2007 (Gallup & Newport, 2008). Other topics indexed under this heading include sexuality, women’s issues, and criminal behavior.
Under “L” in the Library of Congress heading are topics in education. Particularly useful are sources about research in education, and there are many volumes related to the work of the Educational Testing Service.
Try This Now 2.1
Physically go to the library at your institution, identify the Library of Congress call numbers in your area of interest, and see what reference books are on the shelf.
Revisit and Respond 2.2
What is the Library of Congress classification system?
What is a keyword?
What kinds of resources would you expect to find in the Reference section?
In what ways can librarians help with your research project?
Material related to medicine is found under “R” in the Library of Congress heading. Examples include Handbook of Community Psychiatry (McQuistion et al., 2012) and The SAGE Handbook of Health Psychology (Sutton et al., 2004).
Reference Materials: Style Guides and Thesauruses
In addition to handbooks and encyclopedias, the Reference section also typically includes style handbooks such as the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2020); the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (Gibaldi, 2009); The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2017), used by the American Anthropological Association, which also has its own downloadable style guide; and the ASA Style Guide (2010), used by the American Sociological Association.
The reference section also includes an array of thesauruses, such as the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms (Tuleya, 2007), which can be helpful when you begin database searches for articles (see later section in this chapter on “Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms”). Electronic databases such as PsycINFO also include a parallel thesaurus function that is updated periodically. PsycINFO is a database managed by the American Psychological Association; it includes article citations, summaries, and bibliographic material.
PsycINFO: Electronic database of citations and summaries from the American Psychological Association (APA), with over 4 million records.
Online Reference Resources: Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
In addition to bound volumes, colleges may also offer online dictionaries and encyclopedias, which are useful for general overviews of topic areas (the encyclopedias) or for looking up the derivation of words in the case of a source like the Oxford English Dictionary. Common sources for a library to offer online are the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary. Often these online sources will be available under a heading like “Reference Tools” or “Online Reference Sources,” which may be accessible from the library’s home page.
Subject and Research Guides
Colleges and universities may also develop their own list of subject and research guides, which offer specific kinds of help to students including the proper form of citations. Typical offerings are links to citation generators such as BibMe (that will autofill information about a source you have located); links to RefWorks (a Web-based bibliographic and database manager); links to APA resources; to MLA resources; to Chicago resources; to Turabian (a style guide named after the original author); and links to instructions about how to cite government documents.
BibMe: Free bibliographic tool that automatically fills in the citation information; useful for a variety of citations styles, including American Psychological Association (APA).
RefWorks: Bibliographic management tool.
Electronic databases: Electronic searchable collection of materials; useful in research.
Electronic Resources and Keywords
Beyond the print and online reference sources and bound volumes, libraries offer a range of electronic databases, both general and discipline specific. Most of your search for materials will use these electronic databases.
Keywords: The “Key” to Success
Before proceeding, a fuller discussion of keywords is in order. Whatever the stage of your search (beginning or further along), and whether you target journals, books, or other sources of materials, your search will be more effective if you choose appropriate keywords. As mentioned, keywords are search terms for information retrieval. In most journals, for example, authors are asked to provide five or six keywords (words or phrases) for their article that represent the focus of the work. In the case of journals that follow APA style, these items are listed right under the Abstract (Figure 2.5).
Keywords are important for both authors and users because keywords link the search terms you use in a database to articles that use those keywords. In a recent article looking at the stress patients feel in hospital rooms (Andrade & Devlin, 2015), the authors evaluated Roger Ulrich’s (1991) theory of supportive design (a theory that predicts what types of elements in design will reduce patients’ stress). The authors selected the following keywords: hospital rooms, design, patients’ stress, and Ulrich’s theory of supportive design.
Try This Now 2.2
Are some of those terms more effective than others, in your view? Which ones? Why?
Figure 2.5 Example of an Abstract With Keywords Listed
Source: Nier, Bajaj, McLean, & Schwarz (2013). Group status, perceptions of agency, and the correspondence bias: Attributional processes in the formation of stereotypes about high and low status groups. Group Processes & Inter group Relations, 16, 476–487.
PsycINFO
Because it is so heavily used in research in the social and behavioral sciences, this book will emphasize PsycINFO. As mentioned, PsycINFO is a database of citations and summaries offered by the American Psychological Association.1 The database covers journals, books, technical reports, and dissertations in psychology and psychology-related disciplines such as psychiatry, medicine, nursing, education, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. In December 2015, the number of records offered in PsycINFO surpassed 4 million (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/12/psycinfo-database).
1For purposes of illustration here, PsycINFO is being accessed through EBSCOhost, an online reference database system. Your institution may use EBSCOhost or one of the other online reference database systems, such as OVID. The Web interface may have a different graphical presentation in these different database systems than the examples used here.
In PsycINFO, when you enter a keyword and click on the “Suggest Subject Terms” option, related terms appear, which might give you other ways to search for a topic of interest. For example, if you enter the search