Psychology & Counseling

This guide shows how to find journal articles, books, and other materials for psychology, counseling, and related fields. Questions? Ask a librarian!

Find Journal Articles

APA PsycInfo

APA PsycInfo is a database of over 4 million citations to journal articles and a few books, book chapters, and dissertations. It is compiled by the American Psychological Association. Article coverage goes back into the 19th century for some journals. Articles may be available to read online through links to other library subscriptions, particularly APA PsycArticles. The APA has created some tutorials to help you search this resource effectively:

• Finding empirical articles
• Finding articles with a specific methodology (such as quantitative research)
• Finding tests and measurements in a research article (video tutorial)
• Using the thesaurus of psychology terms

Search APA PsycInfo in EBSCOhost

Mental Measurements Yearbook with Tests in Print

Produced by the Buros Center for Testing at the University of Nebraska, this resource contains full-text reviews for test products in psychology, education, business and leadership. In addition, it provides a bibliography to all known commercially available English-language tests currently in print. Search Mental Measurements Yearbook in EBSCOhost.

Academic Search Ultimate

Academic Search Ultimate is a large database with articles from scholarly journals, popular magazines, newspapers, trade periodicals, and more. Many of the articles are available to read online. Searches can obtain more results, but require more narrowing for relevance and scholarly quality. Search Academic Search Ultimate in EBSCOhost

For more suggested sources for journal articles, try the library's Social Sciences databases list

Find Books

Library catalog

McCartney Library's catalog lists the materials that we have: books, movies, music, and more! Enter keywords for your topic, an author's name, or the title of a book to see whether the library owns it and if it is currently available. You can sign in with your Geneva account to check due dates or save lists of items.

WorldCat

WorldCat is a very large, global database of library materials. Start off by searching what McCartney Library owns, then expand the scope to libraries worldwide for even more results.  

Research Tips

Advanced searching

Most library search tools include Advanced Search sections that allow you to limit, focus, and revise your searches. Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT can combine words and phrases to give you more precise results. 

• AND: exercise AND emotion
• OR: dementia or Alzheimer's
• NOT: memory NOT RAM
• "" quotes: "child abuse"
• * asterisk: addict*
• () parentheses: abuse AND ("eating disorders" OR anorexia)

Additional search options such as publication date or scholarly articles will also help narrow your results. Article databases may have a limit for "scholarly journals," "academic journals" or "peer reviewed." They don't read every article, they just look at the journal as a whole, so some items marked "Academic Journal" are an editorial at the beginning or book reviews. In WorldCat, there is no limit for scholarly books, but adding the keyword "bibliographical references" will limit your search to those books that include citations.

Citation tools

• APA online tutorial
• EBSCOhost and WorldCat allow you to create a free account to save your search results for viewing later. You can also email individual articles or citations to yourself.
• The citations provided by databases frequently have errors. Check citations with help from online guides!
• Learn about DOIs a required element in APA citations
• Research organization tools are free and can be used online or downloaded to your computer. Zotero and Mendeley are two popular choices.

Annual Review of Psychology

Annual Reviews publishes literature reviews of current topics in many fields. Researchers analyze scholarly articles (usually more than a hundred) on a topic of interest and describe the current state of knowledge for that field. McCartney Library has access to Annual Review of Psychology in print and online.

• PRINT: v. 16 (1965) - present at the Main Book Stacks, BF30 .A56
• ONLINE: search articles (and read articles published 1950-2005) in APA PsycInfo in EBSCOhost
• ONLINE: browse contents and read issues from 1995 - present at AnnualReviews.org

Finding a particular journal

If you have a citation to an article, you can find out whether the journal is available online or in print at McCartney Library.  Search or browse the title list of McCartney Library's print and online journals, magazines, and newspapers, and see if that year is available.

Interlibrary Loan

Don't limit yourself to what is online. Interlibrary Loan is free and easy.  If you know exactly what you want, fill out the Interlibrary Loan form. When you are looking at a citation in EBSCOhost article databases look for a link saying Request this item through interlibrary loan and all the article information is copied to a request so all you need to do is enter your name, ID, and email address. 

Articles are usually emailed and arrive quickly, sometimes within two days. Books requested through interlibrary loan are delivered to Geneva College through the US Postal Service. Books must be picked up at McCartney Library. We will make every attempt to provide you with items that you can't obtain otherwise!

Email pgcLoan@geneva.edu with questions about interlibrary loan or the status of your request.

Need research advice? Ask a librarian!

• Email: Submit the online form or send your question to ref@geneva.edu
• Phone: Call the library at 724-847-6563
• In person: Visit the library during most open hours to consult with a librarian face to face.