LITERATURE SEARCH RESOURCES

• ​Sites
• ​Search Strategies
• ​Using PEP
• ​Finding Full-Text
• ​Books

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Subscription Databases

Full-text access to APA hosted journal articles past and present, available for access on-campus and off-site for Reiss-Davis students and faculty.

The Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) Archive database provides access to foundational psychodynamic monographs, journals and video. Available for access on-campus and off-site for Reiss-Davis students and faculty.

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Public Library Databases

Get a free library card from the Los Angeles Public Library or the LA County Library to be able to access ProQuest Central, a database that contains the full text of over 400 current scholarly journals in the field of Psychology. Digital library cards may also be available for those who cannot visit a library in person.

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 OTHER Recommended Sites

​These select journal and dissertation search databases include articles and research on child and adolescent mental health. Though many articles found in PubMed, Eric, Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar will not be freely available as full-text, they will give you a feel for the scope of publishing on a topic that might provide direction for deeper investigation.

Indexes articles and journals in the field of Education, selected full text available

Search through articles indexed by the NLM, all medical fields, selected full text available.

A broad index of articles and books in all scholarly disciplines. Contains links to selected full texts.

A searchable Commons Repository for many universities. Go up a layer out to access the Social and Behavioural Science commons in full

An AI powered scholarly search engine. Select "Has PDF" on the search results page to limit to full-text available results.

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Directories of Open Source Literature

A searchable directory of open access journals. Every article you find in freely available, just click the link. Search limiters on the left of the screen provide useful refinements, such as selecting "English Language," as many international journals are represented.

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​Open Dissertations and Theses Sources

PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge. You can quickly and easily locate dissertations and theses relevant to your discipline, and view the complete text in PDF format.

Search graduate level dissertation and theses that are freely available online. Posted by host universities, indexed, searchable and linked to via Open Access Theses and Dissertations.

EBSCO open dissertations has a smaller but different subset of open access dissertations than Proquest, and should be part of your search.

Key Words & the form of author names  change results

Key Words Generation:

• Start with the key words you have, such as from an assignment or topic.
• Use your initial search results (such as the key words attached to relevant abstracts), and brainstorming to come up with alternative key words to expand your search results.
  
• Alternative words for the same concept  will sometime yield vastly different results, especially from different time periods and places (think youth, teen, teenager, adolescent, young adult). ​   
  
• ​Only using the words you already have might not be enough to catch significant contributions to the field.

Narrowing and Broadening approaches to searches:

• You can adjust your search strategy based upon the scope of initial results.
• If you have very few results, you were either using very precise key words, or key words used only by a subset of practitioners studying the phenomena. Perusal of those resources should provide  alternative terminology with which to expand and change the search to net a larger spectrum of relevant literature.
• If you have an overwhelming number of search result, you can then try to  add in words and concepts based to pinpoint the topics sought. If you spot something especially relevant in the first set of results, examine it for any specific words used, especially in the abstract, to help net more results like it.

Author Names:

• Frequently in scholarly publishing only the author's last name is used or cited, and adding in a first name or initials might remove some relevant results, or add so many results that it muddles the search.
• When an author name is common,  it is often better to search using the author last name along with some key words for their field of study. Note that language and terminology shifts over time and by location/culture so those key words might be very different from  those you are used to using.
• If practical, finding a comprehensive author bibliography then using   exact article titles  can sometime find articles  when an author search cannot.

Mine the Material you have for avenues to follow

As mentioned in the key words and author names section,  looking at the work you have on hand to generate search terms is an essential part of conducting a literature search, but the material can also be used in several other ways.

• Use the citation list to comb for significant relevant material
• Use a scholarly search engine to find article that cited the current work after it was published, thus moving forward in time.
• Use a scholarly search engine to find articles that also cited the material cited in the current article, hence broadening the pool of work , and also moving through time.
• Use the author names to find other work by them on the topic or in the field.

CONDUCT MULTIPLE SEARCHES

A single search yielding a single set of results seldom produces a complete picture of the literature being produced on a topic.

DOCUMENT YOUR SEARCH STRATEGIES

Write down (or copy and paste) the key  words and sites being used along with a record of results.

eg: child psychoanalysis (key words used); ERIC (site);  02/26/2021 (date of search); 75 results.

This 1) prevents   work duplication work, and 2) allows a replication of the search later to see if there have been any updates to available content.

​COME BACK TO IT LATER

• Break up search sessions so that   they do not turn into endless rabbit holes. 
  
• If you need a quick nature break breather without going anywhere, try one of explore.org's nature livecams. 

About the Pep ARchive

Overview

The Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) Archive  database is used to provide access to foundational psychodynamic texts for several classes for both the graduate school and fellowship programs, as well as for individually directed research.

PEP archive scope of Content

• Journals*: PEP-Web has over one million pages of online journals!  It contains the complete text and illustrations of 74 premier journals in psychoanalysis. It spans over 148 publication years and contains the full text of articles whose source ranges from 1871 through 2019. There are over 119 thousand articles and over 17.5 thousand figures and illustrations that originally resided on 2396 volumes with over 1 million printed pages. In hard copy, the PEP Archive represents a stack of paper more than 352 feet high and weighing over 4 tons!
• Books: PEP-Web contains   100 classic psychoanalytic books, and the full text and Editorial notes of the 24 volumes of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud as well as the 19 volume German Freud Standard Edition Gesammelte Werke. 
• Videos: PEP-Web partners with various psychoanalytic institutes to produce original video content. As of 2020  nearly 100 videos on the field of psychoanalysis are part of the database.   All videos are professionally transcribed and full-text indexed. 
  

* - Note:  The PEP archive maintains a 3-5 year embargo on some material, so it is recommended that you also become familiar with the libraries of your local public university (such as UCLA), where access to most, but not all, of the embargoed articles, plus many others, are available to public visitors to view and print. 

Accessing the Pep Archive

 Once you are enrolled in or contracted to teach classes, a Reiss-Davis Populi account will be created for you. This account will provide access to course materials, as well as the online library catalog (a work in progress), which hosts a link page through which you will gain link-authenticated access to the PEP archive.
 https://reissdavis.populiweb.com/router/library/links/index (Populi login required)

PEP TUTORIAL:   HOW TO USE PEP

In addition to the title linked tutorial, which focusses on journal content,  each type of PEP material has its own  strategy.

• Book content  - Look at the list of books! It is alphabetical by author, other than S. Freud's standard addition, which is at the top. There is no book search.
• Video content - the video search  presumes some knowledge about the sources of material you might want to browse, but also allows keyword searching. Every video has full transcripts.

Open Access Button 

Free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors. sources include all of the aggregated repositories in the world, hybrid articles, open access journals, and those on authors personal pages.
Just enter an article DOI, PMID, PMC ID, Title, or Citation.

LEARN HOW TO SPOT OR FILTER BY FULL TEXT ON VARIOUS SITES

Recommended sites that offer a filter by full text:

• ERIC has a " Full Text Available on ERIC" check box at the top of search results.
• PubMed has a "Free Full Text " check box in the search result filters (to the left on large screens, otherwise inside a drop down menu).
• Semantic Scholar has a "PDF available" button at the top of the search results page.

Ways to spot full text on some sites:

• Google Scholar  posts links to pdfs to the right of the search results column.   You can also add the term <filetype:pdf> to mostly  limit search results to those with pdfs available. YMV

Sites that only offer full-text results (open source literature searches):

• ​Digital Commons Network Psychology Commons.  Select "other refinements" in the left hand column to be able to limit results to Journal Articles. (Also contains dissertations, conference articles, and other scholarly works).
• Directory of Open Access Journals. Select "articles" to search for articles (instead of being directed to open source journals on the topic, which you would then have to individually search).

LOOK FOR PUBLISHER PAYWALLED CONTENT IN INSTITUTIONAL AND ACADEMIC REPOSITORIES

See if an author is posting to Globally Scholarly Repository Sites (free memberships available):

• Academia.edu
• Researchgate.net 

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​Search for an author/article in google in general and see if they/it are hosted on a university or institution's website.
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To limit google search results to things posted as pdf's, either select that option in google advanced search, or type your <Keywords/article title/author name> plus  <filetype:pdf> into the google search bar.  To limit to an educational site, also add <site:.edu>,

VISIT INSTITUTIONS THAT ALLOW THE PUBLIC TO ACCESS THEIR DATABASES

 Advice in place for once the pandemic is over...
For those non-full text articles that are not available through student PEP archive access  nor the Reiss-Davis Library, a visit to the library of your local public university is recommended  (UCLA is the closest to campus). Use their on-campus public access terminals to get full text access to their journal databases.

Note: due to current policy, as of Spring 2017 you will only be able to Print articles you wish to keep for future use, not save or email. See   UCLA print procedure and fees.   Check for the availability of specific journals using the particular university's online library catalog before you visit.

If you wish to borrow on-shelf books from a UC Library,   an annual fee will apply.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR

Authors are frequently quite happy to share  copies of their previously published articles unless prohibited by  contract.

Authors contact can be made via the institution they work for, through their personal sites, or through repository sites with with they hold accounts (such as Researchgate or Academia.edu). Such information can often be linked to though a service like Open Access  Button even if an article itself is not openly posted.

DECIDE WHEN TO PAY FOR  ACCESS

Deciding to Pay for access:

• Make a realistic evaluation of the value of the content to you and your work.
• An interlibrary loan (ILL) request through a public library for one journal article will usually  run only the cost of the   library  ILL fee ($5-$20), and the cost of the holding  institution 's fees (none to $25 for Ivy League institutions).
• Journal publishers typically charge  $35-$65 per24 hour access to download a journal article, but might provide access to the entire run of the journal for only a few times that, a deal if there are multiple articles from the same publication.
• Access to Psycnet for enrolled graduate students, with access to all APA published journal content past and present would cost $67 for the graduate student APA affiliate membership fee plus $139 for the Psycnet Gold database subscription per calendar year as of 2021.

Book Recommendations oN Literature searches 

The Literature Review: Six Steps to Success by Lawrence A. Machi; Brenda T. McEvoy A thorough compendium on conducting the literature review, with diagrams. ISBN-13: 978-1506336244

Resources

Research Library
​Online Catalog
Writing Resources​