How Psychology Journal Articles Can Save Your Research

When you sit down to write a serious paper in psychology, the journal article is usually the piece of work you cannot do without. The reason is simple: these articles hand you the findings of people who have spent their careers studying the field, and they put that work within reach. One pattern holds up across almost every project. The narrower and more specific your topic, the more a single well-chosen journal article is worth to you. So the question becomes practical. For a paper in psychology, sociology, or any of the related sciences, where do you actually start?

Begin with the big indexes. These are the databases that collect dated or recently updated sources alongside professionally published journal articles from around the world. Many of them pull from APA, NIMH, and similar established journals. If you want to go straight to the journals themselves, a few finder sites are worth keeping on hand: PSYCLINE (psycline.org/journals/psycline.html), the Hanover College Psychology Department journal list (psych.hanover.edu/Krantz/journal.html), Oxford Journals (ei.oxfordjournals.org), and the WWW Virtual Library's psychology journals page (dialogical.net/psychology/journals.html).

Most of these indexes, and plenty more besides, are available through your college library or your local public library. Both tend to stock back issues too, which is handy when the article you need ran years ago. The point of digging through them is not just to fill a bibliography; the research in these journals is what lets you make sense of how the human mind behaves, tangled as it often is. In my own county, for instance, the community colleges give students access to ProQuest Psychology Journals, InfoTrak Expanded Academic ASAP, and direct links to journal websites, among other search tools.

A good deal of the time you can reach an article online without ever setting foot on campus, then download it or print it at home. A handful cost a few dollars. Others are free. Once you land on an index that suits you, look for the journal first. Check that it will give you the full shape of a study: a literature review, the methods, the results, a discussion, and the underlying data. That checklist comes from suggestions passed along by a Skyline College librarian. When you reach the journal itself, hunt for complete pieces by clicking the "full text" option. A list of articles will come back, and from there you click the title, then choose "get article," "download," or "print."