Research Methods in Psychology
This guide is suggested for students of PSY 4050 or those interested in psychology research.
E-Reference Resources
Selecting a Topic
Choosing a topic for your research can feel like an overwhelming task. Find background information on potential topics with the library's E-Reference Resources. The Psychology E-Reference materials should be especially helpful. Examples:
- Self-esteem from the Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology
- Terror Management Theory from the Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology
Defining Terms
As you read through your research articles, you may come across concepts or terms that you are not familiar with. Do not hesitate to look them in the Psychology E-Reference collection. The E-Reference Resources in Research Methodology may be particularly helpful.
Scholarly Articles
The most efficient approach to locating scholarly journal articles on any topic is to start out with one of the library’s databases such as PsycINFO. These databases index hundreds of scholarly journals and will link you to articles on your topic of choice.
The library has subscriptions to numerous scholarly sociology journals. The links on the library’s web site are your access point to the full text online. You may be prompted to authenticate as a Villanova student. Use your Villanova user id and email password. You can find some of the same content through Google, but you may not be able to link to the full text.
PsycINFO 1872-current (ProQuest)To find scholary, peer-reviewed articles in psychology, search the PsycINFO database. Indexes journals, dissertations and some books in the fields of personality psychology, social psychology, educational psychology and more.
For tips on searching within this database, see the Searching PsycINFO library guide, or ask a librarian.
Web of Science (Thomson Reuters)Once you have found useful scholarly articles, it is important to review the sources used to complete that study. Similarly, you can look forward and find which subsequent studies have cited that source through a Cited Reference Search.
Web of Science provides access to current bibliographic information and cited references from the journal literature in the physical and social sciences. Search by article title word, journal title, author, cited author or reference, or address word (e.g. author's institution).
Find Full Text with an Article Citation
Citations
APA Style
Publication manual for the American Psychological Association
- Available for use in the library, this is the official guide to APA style.
- APA Style Blog- a good resource for answering your APA questions
- How to Determine Whether a Title is Paginated by Issue by Tyler Krupa
OWL (Purdue University Online Writing Lab) - APA
- OWL is a freely available online resource provided by Purdue University. The OWL gives clear instructions for formatting your paper and bibliography in APA style.
Research and Documentation Online
- Includes a page specific to doing research in Psychology.
Refworks
RefWorks is a Web-based software package designed to help you easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.
See the Library Guide to Refworks for more information.
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Helfpul Tips
DOI: Digital Object Identifier
Citing and Evaluating Resources
