One of the most important resources for Psychology and Neuroscience students is the American Psychological Association’s PsycARTICLES – a database providing access to full text journal articles from more than 100 titles.
Using the Database
You can access the APA databases via the Online Library. Clicking on either option will take you to the same place. Remember that PsycARTICLES provides full text access to journal articles whereas PsycINFO provides abstracts for a far greater number of articles. This is the list of full text journals.
From the homepage, you have the option to ‘Browse’, ‘Search’ or view articles on ‘trending’ topics:
The “Most popular” browse option allows you to view the 25 Most Downloaded and 25 Most Cited articles from APA Journals.
Searching the Database
You can enter as many or as few search terms as you wish and there are options to select whether you want words/terms to appear in the title, abstract or anywhere in the text of an article. You can also specify a date period and whether you are only looking for full text articles at this stage. If you are also interested in seeing abstracts, then keep PsycINFO selected as well.
See also: Searching using Thesaurus terms in PsycINFO
There are numerous ways that you can filter your results, starting with the choice between PsycINFO (all results including abstracts) or PsycARTICLES (full text only).
From the menu on the left hand side of the screen, you can filter results to show particular journal titles, author, age group, population group and more.
When viewing your results, look for the PDF link to open the full text article which you can save & print. ‘Cited by’ will show you all the other articles/authors who have referenced this particular article.
Help & Support
Please let me know if you have any questions about using this database. The APA also has some very useful help pages, featuring step by step guides to searching and using different features of the database.
