Psych, Soc, Ling & Af Am @ the Library

Choose a Topic that interests you

Walking in the dog park the other day, I started thinking about the different treatments I’d been hearing about for my friends’ dogs’ fears of thunder and lightening storms. No one seemed to want to use boring, old (time-comsuming) desensitization techniques. (Letting their dogs listen to soft thunder sounds and giving them treats for the moments they were calm. Then increasing the sounds and adding flashes of light as they were able to maintain their calm.)

Gotta show you a picture of my darling new doggy, Audrey – who is quite scared during thunderstorms.

No, my friends suggested using flower essences, cloth wraps, TTouch, message, acupuncture. Things that only my nutty friends used in California during the 1970’s. Many of these techniques have now integrated into regular medicine. How has this happened? Massage therapy was never covered under insurance of old. Now acupuncture is covered by most insurance. Why and how has this happened?

2) Find Background Information from Subject Specific Encyclopedias

To find background information and to get a theoretical perspective on the issues involved, look in the index of the encyclopedia, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology.

Now, since this is an encyclopedia of sociology, each of the 56 articles you find slant the topic from a sociological viewpoint — not psychological, not medical. Just what you want for a sociology class and for your question. Cool beans.

Use the first article, Complementary and Alternative Medicine, by Hans Baer to help you

• find references to other articles and books that were seminal to the work on your topic
  • Baer, H. (2001) Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America: Issues of Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender . University of Wisconsin Press , Madison.
• researchers who started the work on your topic
  • Hans Baer
  • Mike Saks
• keywords that researchers use to describe your topic
  • alternative and complementary medicine
  • holistic medicine
  • professionalization
  • biomedicine
  • medical pluralism
• other questions that interest you
  • How have economics contributed to the increase of acceptance of alternative therapies by conventional medicine?
  • Is the rise of alternative medicines related to or parallel to the development of other practicing professionals (nurse practitioners, midwives, physicians assistants) within conventional medicine?
• other encyclopedia articles that relate to your topic
  • Professional Dominance in Medicine
• social theories that explain or define your topic
  • professional dominance

3) Find Books in the library catalog

Next, you can look for the books and articles at the end of the article in our library catalog. Hans Baer’s book is there.

4) Find Articles in subject databases

A couple of different databases may help you find articles that interest you. The Sociology Subject Guide lists several different databases, including Sociological Abstracts, PubMed, and Web of Science. Sociological Abstracts includes journals particularly from a sociological point of view, so that’s a good place to start.

Use the terms from the encyclopedia article:

(complementary medicine OR alternative medicine OR medical pluralism OR holistic medicine)
AND professionalization

If you use the thesaurus, the results will mostly hit right on topic!

Now what can you do? Read through these abstracts and see which really answer your question and which are off topic.

If they look good, click on the and follow the instructions for getting e-journals.

5) You might check out PubMed. Included are journals directed at bioscientists and physicians, so there should be interesting material here. Do similar sorts of searches. You might want to look at these as primary sources, as the object of research — analyze some of the articles from a sociological perspective.

Complementary Medicine[MeSH] AND “medical pluralism”

6) Perform a Citation Search; Find Related Records using Web of Science

Choose an older, pertinent article from your previous searches. Then see who has written a more recent article on a similar topic and cited that article.

Another technique is to search for articles in Web of Science and then to look for Related Records.

• I searched for an article using the same terms as above: “complemetary medicine” AND “medical pluralism”.
• I found the article
  Kaptchuk, T.J. and Eisenberg, D. M. (2001). Varieties of healing. A taxonomy of unconventional healing practices. Annals of Internal Medicine, 135 (3). 196-204.

When you click on the link, you get this record.  On the right hand side of it, you see a link to “Related Records.” I’ve circled it in red and marked it with a red arrow.

If you click here, you’ll get other articles that share the same references and so probably are on the same topics. The articles at the top will share the most references — they should be the most closely related.

  I clicked on the red circle and got the following results:

The articles that share the most references appear at the top of the list. Lots of these articles are on the topic you’re interested in. 

Clicking on the purple circle, I got more recent articles that cited this one:

Keep reading and thinking. Soon you’ll be writing and turning in your paper.

Come visit me, email, or call any time you need help!

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The Reference Universe indexes articles from our online and print reference sources.

Can you believe it? This should be a big help for you. But it’s a big help for us as librarians, as well. Our reference section is huge and articles about different topics are EVERYWHERE! Articles about gay adoption, for instance, are in

Kuersten, Ashlyn K. (2003). Women and the law : leaders, cases, and documents. Santa Barbara, Calif. : ABC-CLIO.

KF478.K84 2003
Law Library

There’s even an article about the law that forbids gay and lesbian couples from adopting children in Florida and the cases that have challenged it, online at

Gender Issues and Sexuality: Essential Primary Sources
2006 Gale [HQ21.G359 2007]
Florida-ban page(s) 1:170-171, 1:176

Anyway, even though as a student I was dedicated to the library, I had no idea the greatness of the reference section. It has still been difficult to determine what is where in the reference section, unless you’ve been a reference librarian for 20 years. Now those of us who don’t stalk the stacks can find wonderful articles.

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A great encyclopedia! Tell me if you like it!

Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics

Look what we have access to online!

My gosh, this is an amazing encyclopedia and one that should be useful to almost everyone in all of your departments. The topics of the articles are amazing and fascinating. Just browsing through it is a thrill. You can search it from the top of the page as well.

Science Direct’s publicity states that

the online version will include updates as subjects develop ELL2 includes: * c. 7,500,000 words * c. 11,000 pages * c. 3,000 articles * c. 1,500 figures: 130 halftones and 150 colour * Supplementary audio, video and text files online * c. 3,500 glossary definitions * c. 39,000 references * Extensive list of commonly used abbreviations * List of languages of the world (including information on no. of speakers, language family, etc.) * Approximately 700 biographical entries (now includes contemporary linguists) * 200 language maps in print and online. Also available online via ScienceDirect – featuring extensive browsing, searching, and internal cross-referencing between articles in the work, plus dynamic linking to journal articles and abstract databases, making navigation flexible and easy.

It’s hard to even list the topics — there are articles on everything. And references to articles and books.

For example, say you are interested in how Latinos/as perceive their medical treatment in the US. You might want to know how they see their interaction with their physicians and other health care professionals.

Doctors and Patients in Multilingual Settings, Pages 741-748, C. Roberts
Full Text + Links

Cross references to other articles in the Encyclopedia are

Conversation Analysis

Conversational Analytic Approaches to Culture

Medical Discourse: Illness Narratives

Medical Discourse: Non-Western Cultures

…Along with 23 references to articles and books outside the encyclopedia (including some linked to full-text).

On the other hand, there are great numbers of articles on technical areas of linguistics. This is really a encyclopedia to return to again and again.

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I just fell upon it — It’s from ScienceDirect — Quite Expensive — Please Use It!

You know, UF Libraries have so many resources, none of us know what all we have! Especially since we share resources with the Health Science Center Library and the Legal Information Center (the Law School Library), I’m sometimes amazed at what we have.

Very soon, in a couple of weeks, we’ll be getting the online version of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics through ScienceDirect. This is the revised edition of the 10-volume 1990 set. Anyway, I was just looking around ScienceDirect, hoping to find a bit of info about the Encyclopedia and maybe a sample article or two that I’d missed before. Or one they’d added.

And to my delighted eyes, what appeared was another encyclopedia: The Encyclopedia of the Human Brain Editor-in-Chief: V. S. Ramachandran (from my alma mater)! The Health Science Center Library (HSCL) must have decided to buy it. Thank you HSCL! Little did they know how much they have aided folks who research and study in all of the departments dear to my heart and yours! Here are some interesting articles:

Each article includes a glossary and great set of references. You never have to stop studying your topic of choice! (I know! It’s just like every other addiction in the world. It’s always there for you. But it’s almost free if you’re aligned with UF. There are articles on addiction, too!)

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Online Now! Statistics and Measurements! Methodology Encyclopedias!

It’s 2 a.m. You’re reading an interesting paper on sentence processing: Reading sentences with a late closure ambiguity: Does semantic information help? Lipka, Sigrid; Language and Cognitive Processes, Vol 17(3), Jun 2002. pp. 271-298. And you get to a paragraph in the methodology section that states they set up a 2X2 Latin Square.

“What?” you think. “A Latin Square? I don’t remember that. They started dancing in the middle of their analysis? It does help break the tension…” Well, I usually don’t do that myself. But luckily, I remembered that the library has a trial subscription (soon a regular subscription) to several online encyclopedias from Sage Publications. So I searched for the term “Latin Square” and found an article explaining what a Latin Square is and why they are used.

As the Psych, Soc, Ling, and CSD Librarian, I am especially happy about this, because it includes something I’ve dreamt about for several years: 3 methods related encyclopedias — 1 in Statistics & Measurements, 1 in Research Methods in the Social Sciences and 1 in Psychological Assessments.

Yep. In the middle of the night, you can have questions answered! Plus the interface is excellent. The Home Page for each encyclopedia has a list of broad topics that branch off to more specific articles. Or you can look through all of the articles in an alphabetical list. Or you can search for terms in a basic search or a more specific search. Or look through the index.

Each signed article has links to other, related articles. Each article also includes several articles and books for further reading. This is wonderful for another use of the encyclopedia. Doing your own research.

Say you decide to develop a questionaire. You read the several articles in the Methods Encyclopedia on Questionaires/Survey Design, (even an article on Internet Surveys) but are hungry for more! Here are suggestions for further reading from one of the articles:

Blumer, H. Sociological analysis and the “variable.” American Sociological Review vol. 21 pp. 683–690 (1956).

de Vaus, D. (Ed.). (2002). Social surveys (4 vols.). London: Sage.

Groves, R. M. (1989). Survey errors and survey costs. New York: Wiley.

Marsh, C. (1982). The survey method: The contribution of surveys to sociological explanation. London: Allen & Unwin.

Rosenberg, M. (1968). The logic of survey analysis. New York: Basic Books.

Not bad!

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The World Atlas of Language Structures! A Book a Linguist would LOVE

One day last year, I went home to visit my parents. My father had a book in his hand; he was beaming. “Merrie,” he said, “you have to see this book. It’s by John MacDonald.” Honestly, I don’t remember the author’s name nor the name of the book. “It’s called ‘The Historical Atlas of the World 1625-1895.’ You have to read it. Every word is a gem!”

“Oh.” I said, thrilled. Someone in the world had found out about historical atlases! It’s something that I fear only librarians know about. But Barnes & Noble had put one on its remaindered shelf and my father had found it for $10. Excellent! “That’s great. I always try to get students to read those. Atlases are wonderful. In them time and space are superimposed so that folks can see where and when history took place.”

My Dad was persistent. It was that particular book that was special. “This John MacDonald. Every word is important. You have to read it. I’m going back to find more of them!”

Well, let me tell you all. We have a fantastic NEW atlas in. If you’re a linguist, it’s probably the most fun you may ever have with an atlas: The World Atlas of Language Structures (LIBRARY WEST: — Reference (3rd Floor) — P143 .W67 2005 [In-Library Use]

It’ll take you ages to look through the whole thing. There are articles about the typology of languages — what grammatical and phonological features occur in which languages. Then the languages are literally mapped out.

And for those of us interested in signed languages, there are even two maps of 21 signed languages — they are mapped by negative incorporation and question particles. Very cool!

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Finding a Topic? Narrowing a Topic? Need Info in a New Area? Look in an Encyclopedia

When you think of encyclopedias or dictionaries, you probably think of World Book, Britannica, or Websters. But we have encyclopedias, dictionaries, and handbooks that focus on particular topics, with articles by eminent scholars, overviews, providing background to almost anything you need to know about. The reference citations lead you to core articles and conversations between scholars and researchers.

We have many encyclopedias online through the Gale Virtual Reference Library. You can search for topics through all of the articles in all of the encyclopedia we have online at the same time. Or you can browse through them individually by linking to them through the Library Catalog.
The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood is one of my favorites.

We also have access to the Encyclopedia of Psychology published by the American Psychological Association. (It is browseable by volume only, so the link above only goes to the first volume.) In the next couple of months, we will buy the Encyclopedia of Sociology published by Blackwell and edited by George Ritzer.

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Online Reference Books, Primary Sources, Biographies, Essays, and Special Features

I’m thrilled to announce that the UF Libraries now have access to the Oxford African American Studies Center, an online multidiscliplinary reference database edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University.

Wander through the database. You can find biographies, primary sources, information about music and art, life and culture, history, business, just about anything. It’s especially good for finding topics for papers and getting started with good background information for papers and presentations.

For example, browsing through the maps, I found a map of “Post-War Black Schools,” along with a description of the Freedman’s Bureau and its relationship to education. A list of related links (within the database) would led me to the following articles

• Education (At a Glance)
• Freedmen’s Bureau (At a Glance)
• Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Women
• Howard, Oliver O.
• Howard University

Navigation is easy and fluid. A timeline guides the user through all aspects of the African Diaspora at once or specific aspects of it, including links to articles in the database. You can highlight any word or phrase in an article, click on “Look it up” at the top of the page. The phrase will move into the search box and it will be automatically searched.

Under “Links” on the black stripe at the top of the page, are excellent links to websites on other topics: dance in Africa and the African Diaspora, Black women writers, the Greensboro sit-ins, African Americans in the military, among others.

You can print out or email articles to yourself.

As usual, let me know what you think about this database — positive and negative. If you’re having problems finding something you feel must be in it, but is elusive, we might be able to find it together. There’s another similar (but even more exciting) database in our near future. So keep your eyes here!

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