Psych, Soc, Ling & Af Am @ the Library

Guest Blogger: Becca Tanner.

Sometimes, the hardest part of research is knowing where to start.  There is a tremendous amount of information out there, and nowhere near enough time to find it all.  However, there are some incredible sources of information that tend to be overlooked.  These sources are often excellent places to start in the research process–you may have a general idea of what you are interested in, but don’t know much about the subject itself.  The Surprising Sources series will introduce you to  the sources (primarily online) that you may never have considered as a starting point.  Spending some time checking out these sites will often not only help you come up with a research question, but provide other sources to go to for more specific information.  They are valuable assets for understanding the context and background of what you are interested in.

Frontiline on PBS

One incredibly rich source of information is .  Yes, the land of Nova, Sesame Street and costume dramas also has excellent resources for those of us in the social sciences.  For instance, the documentary series Frontline produced the show “The Persuaders” (2004),  a documentary that deals with marketing and advertising.  It provides not only a detailed look how goods and ideas are sold to us, but also at the impact that marketing has, both on consumers and society as a whole.  It is a good introduction to both the sociological and psychological impacts of marketing. Luckily for us, PBS provides more than just the documentary.  In addition to the show, there are additional web features that discuss neuroscience in marketing, as well as an examination of how a brand is created, and interviews and discussions with those involved with the show.  Even better is the links/reading section, which takes you to even more sources–from organizations that deal with privacy concerns, to advertising trade magazines, to tools that allow you to identify different types of consumers in your area.  PBS hooks you up with the good, the bad and the ugly of marketing, and just about any other topic you are interested in. Let’s say that after watching “The Persuaders”, and browsing through the extra information, you have discovered a topic to look into further–how psychology has informed and changed the nature of political advertising.  From the Frontline link page for the Persuaders, you can go to The Living Room Candidate, which has archives of political ads dating back to Eisenhower (1952, for those of us too young to remember), with links to analysis and information on nearly everything you could think of relating to political advertising.  Incidentally, the Living Room Candidate website also provides a link back to a 1998 PBS program, ““The :30 Second Candidate” which provides further information about how politicians are “sold” during a campaign and provides its own list of resources to help you in your research.

Added by Merrie:

Where would you go from here? We have several databases that are relevant to the marketplace and advertising. Communication Mass Media Complete, Business Source Premier, and PsycNET will all lead you to more scholarly sources.

Other articles from this blog on PBS: The Criminalization of Mental Illness and African American Newspapers

PBS offers this sort of indepth additional material for nearly all the programs on their website, and it they offer a variety of links to other resources to continue your research.  You will be amazed at what you find.  So next time you need ideas or more information about a subject, visit PBS to find out what they have.

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Social Theory is a new trial database that will be available to us to play with and evaluate until August 4, 2009 from Alexander Street . It’s been around for a few years, but recently quite a bit of new content has been added.

http://soth.alexanderstreet.com

Alexander Street Press says that

“The latest release features 32,500 pages of new material, bringing the collection to more than 122,000 pages from 346 works by 100 authors.

Highlights include 33 volumes of the Complete Works of Marx & Engels and nearly 26,000 pages of German language content. Other featured authors in this release include Lewis Coser, Dorothy Smith, Theodor Adorno, Niklas Luhmann, and Jurgen Habermas.

Social Theory brings together an extensive range of influential writings representing the most important trends of sociological thought from the eighteenth century to the present day.  Each document is carefully indexed to promote highly targeted full-text searching that can stimulate fresh insights into even the most familiar texts.  When complete, the database will grow to more than 150,000 pages of full-text material.”

Because of funding issues, I’m not sure how likely it is that we could purchase or subscribe to Social Theory, but I’d definitely like to know your views on the database. If you love it, there’s hope.

I’m also hoping that this database can help translate some of the more difficult theorists and make all of their works easily available to our community.

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Want to learn how to use all the great features of APA’s PsycINFO? APA has free webinars that teach you how to wander through their databases and find the exact articles you want on the exact topic you’re interested in.

We subscribe to PsycINFO on 2 different interfaces — APA’s own, called PsycNET and EbscoHOST. Personally, I find PsycNET easier to navigate and it provides direct links to publisher websites which we often subscribe to directly. But they include the same data about the publications.

Go to APA’s website to find dates and links to the webinars. Make sure you watch the webinar about the interface you prefer, PsycNET or EbscoHOST. Navigating and using search features are very different depending on which you use.

And I’m always here to help if you need anything!

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For many years, various social sciences and sciences have “Annual Yearbooks:” including broad overview articles, written by current authoritative researchers. These have been extremely helpful for teaching new areas of study, learning new areas of study, and finding reference sources.

Now, Wiley- has published an online journal, Compass, that provides broad, overarching articles on issues in Linguistics. Often articles in disciplines like Psychology or LInguistics report about very narrow issues or experiments. Compass make it possible to place the report into a larger questions and theory.

Here are some wonderful new papers in compass.

Sands, B.. (2009) Africa’s Linguistic Diversity. Language & Linguistics Compass, 3(2), 559–580. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00124.x

Simpson, A. P. (2009). Phonetic differences between male and female speech, 3(2), 621-640. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2009.00125.x

Cohen, A. (2009). Probability in Semantics. Language & Linguistics Compass, 3(1),  265-281. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00097.x

Dallas, A. & Kaan, E. (2008) Second Language Processing of Filler-Gap Dependencies by Late Learners. Language & Linguistics Compass, 2(3), 372-388. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00056.x 

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PsycBOOKS contains books published by APA Books and others. There are more that 1,300 titles covered in PsycBOOKS. More than 600 are designated to be Classic Books, landmark books that are generally out of print.

PsycInfo heavily indexes each chapter and book of PsycBooks, links to it, and allows you to download whole chpaters. So in other words, you can search for chapters in books just like you would for articles in journals and then read them on your computer or print them out.

The books are both classic, landmark books that are out of print and recently-published, within the past year.

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A student asked me recently if there is a way to get APA Style citations for articles indexed in PsycINFO. She knew she could export the article information to RefWorks and then print out a bibliography, but she wanted the citation directly from PsycINFO.

Many databases will give you citations to their articles; some give you options for several different styles. Most are pretty straightforward about how to do this. But often the links are hidden.

In PsycINFO, you should either  click on the box next to the one or several articles you’re interested in or open the record for the article. Then, click on the SAVE link above the list of articles. When the Save page opens, change the drop down menu to “Citation in APA Style.” Save the  citations to a text or HTML file and you have your citations!

In databases on the CSA Illumna platform (Linguistics and Language Behavior, Sociological Abstracts, ERIC, PAIS International, and Criminal Justice Abstracts), you can set up a bibliography in several different citation styles.

Just click on the articles of interest to you. Click on “Save, Print, Email” above the results list. On the next page, choose whether you’d like a bibliography of only your marked records (those you’ve clicked on) or all of those that were found.

Skip the comments box, choose whether you’d like the bibliography in HTML, Text, RTF, or MS Word formats. Then choose one of several citation styles: APA, the American Medical Association, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, or Turabian. Click on Create and you’ve got a bibliography of the articles you’ve just found.

They suggest you “check your references for accuracy.” I must agree. I ran a practice bibliography in APA Style and noticed that 2 of the 4 citations didn’t include volume numbers, required for APA Style. They also didn’t include the DOI which APA now requires. And it includes the sentence “Retrieved from www.csa.com.” APA no longer requires or suggests this. It looks like the citation format is based on an older version of APA.

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Getting Weird Results When Searching by Author in PsycINFO?

A psychology faculty member emailed me about a bug/problem/interesting he found when searching for articles by a specific author. Even though he typed in the author’s entire name, including middle initial, the results included articles written by everyone with the same first and last names. I repeated the search, enclosing the name in quotes and then in parentheses and got the same results.

But they probably do that because middle initials are pesky things that are often wrong in citations. Still..

Use the Author Lookup. Click on the link below the search boxes.

Then, type in as much of the name of the author as you know.

You’ll get a list of authors indexed in PsycINFO. Check those that might be your author; they’ll be added to a list on the right hand side of the page.

I was interested in finding Carol A. Padden. I entered “padden” into the Author Lookup. Several “paddens” were found. I clicked on Padden, Carol and Padden, Carol A. They were placed on the right hand side. If I want to remove either, I can just click on the trash cans.

Click on the red “Add to Search” button, and they’ll be placed in the search boxes on the search page, as below.

(Padden, Carol A) OR (Padden, Carol) have both been added to the search box in the “author” field. I can limit the search further any way I want and get articles only by Prof. Padden.

It’s very specific and focused, but requires a few more steps.

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I can’t download APA Journals from home!

This has happened a couple of times this semester. APA reported massive downloads from our proxy server several times. To protect itself, APA blocked our proxy’s IP-address from access to PsycArticles and PsycBooks. APA believes the download occurs via a robotic method. You might have noticed that last weekend until yesterday (March 31 – April 4, 2007) access was again down. (Then again, you might have been too busy watching the Gators win a 2nd National Championship in Basketball!)

If this happens again, please access PsycArticles and PsycBooks through the VPN. I know that a few of you have had problems with the VPN and at least one of you have a complicated local network which the VPN interferes with. However, for most of the off campus UF community, the VPN should mimic your computer life on campus.

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Searching Sources in LexisNexis — Voluntary Deportation Program

Last week, during during the thunderstorm, I was driving home to my family in South Carolina. It was Saturday . I was listening to NPR and something interesting came on the radio. “Hmm,” I thought. That would make a nice topic to build a blog around.”

A week later, I can’t remember a thing about the story. Was it about children? Something about demographics? Shoot.

When I got back to the library, I realized I could look in LexisNexis to find the transcript from NPR and figure out what I was listening to. (I could have done this from my parents’ home using the VPN, but I was busy crocheting and finding furniture in junk stores.)

LexisNexis includes news sources from all over the world, including articles from newspapers, transcripts from television and radio, book and film reviews, and reports from the newswires. But on Monday morning I wanted to know what I’d been listening to on NPR, so I went to the library’s home page and clicked on databases in the first column. In the second box on the databases page, I typed in LexisNexis. There are several different parts to LexisNexis — the one that contains the news is LexisNexis Academic. (There are no scholarly works in here. I think it’s called “Academic,” because it’s marketed to academic libraries. Yeah.)

LexisNexis will open to this screen:Click on the “Sources” tab at the top. (If you want to search all sources at once, you can use this screen without going to the sources screen.)

In this case, I know exactly which news source I want — NPR — so I’m  clicking on the FIND SOURCES under tab at the top and typing in NPR in the box. Then I’ll click on the search button, Find Sources, at the right side of the screen. 

Notice

You have to click the box next to NPR and send it to the front page for the search:

You can also get transcripts from the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the Official Kremlin Intnl News Broadcast, and CNBC/Dow Jones Business Video among others. If you look at all of the drop down menus from the first box and their secondary dropdown menus (i.e., the second dropdown menu changes depending on the first menu) you’ll find an amazing variety of sources. Enjoy! To find these, use the Browse Sources tab at the top.

Then, to find the report I was listening to, I realized since it was over the weekend, it would be on the “Weekend Edition.” My search looked like this (Note “all things” in the “show” field): from the previous week(end).

And the results:

There it is! An article on the low number of folks who voluntarily turned themselves into the deportation program before it ended last Friday.

 However, as I look at the list of transcripts, I realize that I must have started listening after the reports on the large numbers of child abuse cases reported by juveniles in institutions in Texas and across the United States. Hmm…many interesting articles…

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So, Which Database Should I Use Already?

One major problem researchers often encounter is deciding which database to use. UF Librarians develop Subject Guides listing databases for each domain, but the lists may include 20 databases! How is a confused student to decide among them? Mostly, folks just use the databases they always use. Often it’s not a good one for what they’re looking for. And then they say…

“I can’t find anything about sleep disorders! Someone must have written about it! I see it on TV commercials all the time.”

Well, Sociological Abstracts is probably not the best database to find articles on sleep disorders. (Though I was surprised to find some interesting things on it there. But they might not be what a psychology students expected or needed.)

What are the differences between databases?

• Which journals does the database index?
• Which subject area are the journals in?
• Are the journals all in one subject area or are the journals in all subject areas?
• Are the journals almost all scholarly or almost all popular or is there a mix?
• How many journals are covered?
• What does the database index besides journals?
• Does it include books, chapters in books, websites, encyclopedias, dissertations?
• Does the database include abstracts or summaries of the articles or just citations?
• Does the database have an interface that’s easy to use?
• Do you have a choice of interfaces?
• Is the interface not easy, but powerful (You can find everything, if you spend a lot of time learning how to use it. Some well-designed interfaces are both.)

Here is a chart that compares the features of databases useful in our departments. I will writing more about making these decisions later. Enjoy!

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