Psych, Soc, Ling & Af Am @ the Library

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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The Times of London reported that the original study suggesting a link between vaccinations and autism used questionable data. Well, not just questionable, but really altered data.

Andrew Wakefield published a study stating that 8 of 12 children who were sent to him with autism had developed it autism within 24 hours to 2 weeks after the MMR injection. However, the investigation by The Times describes medical records showing that all but 1 child had already been treated or tested for brain disorders.

He apparently also told at least one parent that the measles virus was found alive in the child’s tissue. Three other labs in America found no virus. Apparently, Wakefield already knew this from studies in his own lab done before the paper was published, according to papers found by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the story.

Fudging data to make one’s point: it’s a temptation for many researchers. But this appears to be bad, unethical science done for money from legal services and to sell a new vaccine for the same diseases.

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Most of you know of my love for knitting, spinning, weaving, dyeing — all of the fiber arts. Well, I finally have something I can legitimately share with you on this blog.

A researcher, Dr Karen Norberg from the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, decided to knit an anatomically correct brain. She says that unlike clay or metal, the development of the brain through the knit stitches mirrored the growth of a human brain.

Check out the Museum of Fabric Brain Art. And this article in Scientific American.

Dr Norberg used different colours to represent parts of the notoriously complex organ : Barcroft Media

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In our catalog before, if you only knew the beginning of the title of a book or had a spelling problem, searching for the book might be futile or it appear anywhere on the list. Perhaps even on the second or third page! However, now we allow you to search for a title or author and get what librarians call a “browse” results list.

To use the the browse search, I click on the middle radio button on the library catalog search screen (Search begins with (browse)). I’ll search for a book I’m reading: Wikenomics.

See how cool? Even though I don’t know how to spell, I still find my book! (Actually, depending on the misspelling, this issue is often resolved in the basic search as well. You can get a “Did you mean ‘wikinomics’?” question that will lead you to the correct record.”)

But the browse should help you find books and authors when you know them already! Have a go at it!

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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 chubby beagle-mix, Audrey Hepburn, who is quite afraid of 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!

Thesaurus search for alternative medicine

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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New Handbooks in Methodology from Sage Publications

As I’ve mentioned before, the library is trying to develop a strong methodology collection and get it used! Peter Malanchuk, our Librarian for Political Science, and Colleen Seale and Michael Dietz, both from the Reference Department, are collaborating with me to determine what reference materials and circulating books would enlighten students and faculty most during those dark moments of HUH?? or just the grayish ones.

Sage Publications has a well-earned reputation for producing some of the very best methodology handbooks. They are where I turn when I want to develop our collection. We also chose these texts because the articles include case studies from all over the social sciences: from political science to communication, psychology to television. Check out the Table of Contents. Pretty impressive.

Recently, Peter and I requested feedback on sets that reprinted “benchmark” articles about issues on particular methodologies. We already have a few of the sets:

Ethnography / edited by Alan Bryman. Table of Contents
The American tradition in qualitative research / edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Table of Contents
Conversation analysis / edited by Paul Drew & John Heritage. Table of Contents

They are all going into reference, so you’ll be able to get at them when you need them. Faculty members can assign readings from them. They have wonderful reference lists after each article which should lead you to other readings.

From consulting the suggestions from faculty and the requests we get from students, we’ve decided to buy the following sets:

Measurement / edited by David Bartholomew Table of Contents
Research Design / edited by David de Vaus Table of Contents
Evaluation Research Methods / edited by Elliot Stern Table of Contents

Several faculty members asked for the Measurement texts and students are often confused about how and why they should use certain tests and inventories. Research Design was also requested and is broad, addressing very general issues confronted by most researchers.

Thank you for you assistance and let me know what other books we can gather together for you!

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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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Recently 2 graduate students asked me if online databases would find print journals articles as well as electronic ones. And, they wanted to know, would they find articles that weren’t in their own database. “Would Sociological Abstracts find journals that weren’t full-text in Sociological Abstracts?” That was pretty ironic, since Sociological Abstracts actually contains no full-text journals.

“Huh?” you say. “I found an article that was online from SA just yesterday.” Yeah. Sort of.

This explanation might bore you to tears (which is why we rarely tell anyone). On the other hand, it might clear up everything in the world for you.

Here’s my beautiful diagram:
The first two boxes under the main database box show that some databases only index journals and articles, but don’t have full text themselves. In our fields, these are the databases used most often, like LLBA, Sociological Abstracts, and PsycINFO.

You look through these databases for articles of interest. If you find one, a software, called SFX uses DOIs (digital object indicators — numbers that link to articles) to find the ARTICLES we have access to through other databases. Sometimes articles don’t have DOIs or our SFX database isn’t up to date. Then you can follow another link to our catalog where we list whether we have print copies of the journal or whether we subscribe to the e-journal for which time period. (It doesn’t tell you if we have the particular ARTICLE there.) If we have ever subscribed to it (through any database), it will link to our database of e-journals and then to the database where the journal is. You need to look for the article there.

Other databases only contain full text journals — most of these are publisher’s databases or Open Access databases. In the Social Sciences you generally don’t use these to look for articles. They are basically archives of journal articles. Generally, you use SFX or serial solutions to provide links between the indexing databases and the archiving databases.

But there is another type of databases. Like Academic Search Premier or Gale’s OneFile. These have journals from lots of different publishers. The database indexes all kinds of articles, scholarly and popular, from all different fields — science, social science and humanities. Some is full text, some are just citations.

So you can look up citations to full text or print in almost any index and find full text and print articles there. Link to them. Link to the library catalog. Pretty much just play around for as long as you’d like. I hope this made some sense and was a bit interesting to you…

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Alerts to New Publications from Your Favorite Databases and Journals

In Graduate School, I was wicked jealous of a post-doc’s doctoral days at MIT. Her cognitive science librarian would send her newly published articles to stimulate my friend’s scholarly curiosity. The librarian did this not only for my friend, but for the entire faculty and graduate student population of her department

Well, life has changed. The library faculty has shrunk and the number of our liaison departments has grown. At the same time, however, electronic databases and e-journals have stepped in to send you alerts every time a new article is published that you might like.

How does it work? Well, after you decide on the appropriate database and the best search terms, save a search, and then you can have the database run that search for you every so often (usually, you decide the time period). E-journals will usually run the search after each issue is published. In your email, you receive an update or alert about the new articles published after your last search.

So, if you are awaiting the article of your favorite author, you can save an author search. Have the database automatically run it and then email the results to you.

For an explicit example, check out the tutorial about setting up an alert in CSA databases like Sociological Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts or LLBA or the one about setting up an alert in EBSCO databases like PsycINFO, Academic Search Premiere, or GLBT Life Full Text.

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Find Tests, Measures and Inventories in PsycINFO

Another tip about finding Tests and Measures. When you get into PsycINFO, type in the domain of interest to you in the search box — say, body image.

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