Subject Guide to Psychology

Back to Guides

If you need help, don't hesitate to ask at the reference desk, or contact Reference Librarians Linda Moore or Mark Maier.

Try these encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference guides to get started. Click on the link to see the call number.

Library Research Guide:
The APA's Library Research in Psychology: Finding It Easily

Guide to the Literature:
Psychology: A Guide to Reference andInformation SourcesRef BF 121 .B39 1993

Dictionaries:
International Dictionary of PsychologyRef BF 31 .S83 1996

Biography:
Biographical Dictionary of PsychologyRef BF 109 .A1 B56 1997

Thesaurus:
Thesaurus of Psychological Index TermsRef BF 1 .P655 2001

Tests:
Mental Measurement Yearbook (MMY)Ref BF 431 .M46
Tests in Print Ref BF 176 .T43 1997

Bibliography: Psychology: An Introductory BibliographyRef BF 121 .P79

Citing Sources:

Publication Manual of the American Psychological AssociationRef BF 76.7.P83
An excellent guide to citing electronic sources can be found in Columbia Guide to Online Style Ref PN 171 .F56 W35 1998

Moving to the next step: finding books

To find books in the Mossey Library, use the Mossey Library Catalog.

Use MeLCat to request books and audio-visual materials directly from other Michigan libraries over the web. Use OCLC WorldCat to search the holdings of over 3000 libraries worldwide in a single search. You will have to use interlibrary loan to obtain copies of these books.

Continuing on: the best places to find articles

Basic Search: to find basic or general articles on psychological topics already in Mossey Library, use the Social Sciences Citation Index. The database contains more than 600,000 entries from over 550 journal titles, including many of the core titles in Psychology. Many of the articles are available in electronic format.

Intermediate Search: for more advanced topics, you can search over 12,000 journals in a single search by using Article First, which indexes the current table of contents pages of several hundred core titles in psychology.

Comprehensive Search: for more detailed research, search PsycInfo. It indexes close to 10,000 sources. The database contains more than 1.5 million citations. Another database to use is Medline, covering 9580 journals from 1965 to the present, with more than 12 million citations. This is a good source for articles dealing with the medical aspects of psychology and psychiatry. Also try Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives and Reference Works which contains over 23,000 pages of transcripts of therapy, counseling sessions and first-person narratives illuminating the experience of mental illness and its treatment.

Scholarly Web sites to Pursue

Use PsychWeb and PsychCrawler, both specific, focused search engines compiled by psychologists.

Try searching GoogleScholar for scholarly literature across many disciplines and identify resources available from Mossey Library.

Try also Princeton or the Librarian's Index to the Internet. These finding tools provide fewer but higher quality sites than general purposes search engines.

For an excellent online guide to careers in Psychology see: Opportunities in Psychology Careers

For additional information, see the Hillsdale College Psychology Department Homepage