PSY 3360 Psychological Disorders

Scholarly/peer-reviewed research articles are often useful as evidence for your paper/presentation. Following the BEAM method, they can be used as "exhibit" sources or as "argument" sources, bringing various voices into the scholarly conversation of your paper and using researching findings to support or contradict your own or others' views. 

To search for these types of sources,

• Start with a subject-specific database like APA PsycInfo to locate a few articles from a psychology perspective and identify key terms you might use later on.
• Then expand your search to include other multidisciplinary and subject-specific databases in other disciplines. For example,
  • including Academic Search Complete, a broad, multidisciplinary database, will pull in articles from many different disciplines.
  • searching within subject-specific databases like ERIC (education), MEDLINE (medicine), Sociological Abstracts (Sociology), or others will offer insights into that discipline's perspective on your research question.

• Separate concepts onto each line of the advanced search
• Use AND to locate both concepts in the same article; use OR to find at least one
• Use * to search for root of a word (i.e. psych* will find all instances of psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychosomatic, etc.)

• Use the Thesaurus to translate your topic into psychological terms
  • Add additional terms you might not have considered from Broader/Narrower/Related Terms
  • Explode: search for main term and all Narrower terms at once using OR
  • Major Concept: primary or secondary focus of the article