Consumer Psychology for Optimum Business Solutions

Choose Quality Publications

The top journals for consumer psychology are:

Journal of Consumer Psychology

Journal of Consumer Research

To identify other high quality scholarly business journals check well respected lists such as the 45 Journals Used in the Financial Times Research Rank or impact factor or eigenfactor in Journal Citation Reports. 

Know how to tell the difference between scholarly and trade  or popular journals. 

Quick techniques for identifying scholarly articles & journals. 

• Look for the editorial page of the journal.  Does the editorial board include many academics?  Are there detailed instructions for article submissions?  --> Scholarly Journal.
• Do an internal evaluation of the article.  Are there sections related to the statement of the problem, hypothesis, methods, data and results? Are their many references included?  Are the authors credentials academic-->Scholarly Article.

Article Databases for Consumer Psychology

Searching Tips

• Use synonyms, brainstorm and mine found resources
• Notice controlled vocabulary, index, descriptor and subject terms.  Take good notes!
• Use truncation to search for all terms with the same root: child* for child, children and childhood
• Combine terms with boolean operators, AND contains both terms, OR contains at least one term
• Search phrases; quotes work for most databases
• Use facets to limit seach to publication type such as trade publications, newspapers or peer reviewed journals
• Use dropdown menu or radio buttons to limit search to fields such as title, subject, abstract, descriptors
• Save time and frustration with the Help menu: every database has one!

Contributed by Kristyna Carroll