Searching the Literature–a short guide.

When working on a research paper it is important to see what research has been done before. Reading relevant journals in the field is always a useful way to begin, but it is also possible to do computer searches of the major scientific journals. There are at least three computerized guides to the literature that are particularly useful, PsychLit, Social Science Citation Index, and Medline.

PsychLit (from the American Psychological Association) available at (http://hopper.library.northwestern.edu/) may be used to search for abstracts to articles that have particular keywords in their title or abstract. Searches can be done using Boolean logic to combine or limit the search.

"PsycINFO - An index to articles in the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines, including medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, and linguistics. PsycINFO contains references with abstracts to articles in over 1,300 journals in more than 20 languages, and to book chapters and books in the English language. Coverage is from 1967 to the present for journal articles, and from 1987 to the present for book chapters."

To use PsychLit use the account "nusearch" and the password "nusearch".

Psych Lit is a good way to start a search. Results from Psych Lit may be downloaded to your own account so that you can build up a personal database of relevant literature. Some find it more convenient to use the telnet vesion of PsychLit.

Once you have found relevant abstracts you should go to the library and read the actual articles. Then, by looking at the reference section you can find other relevant articles. Unfortunately, this technique will take you backwards into time, in that the articles cited in a particular article will be older yet.

If you have found a particularly important article, you can then see who is currently citing that article by using the Social Science and Science Citation Indexes (SSCI and SCI) which are available for NU users at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/database/webofscience/.

The SSCI and SCI allows one to search for works that cite a particular author or a particular paper. They also allow for hot linking to other articles cited in or citing the article. The SSCI can be used for keyword and title searches as well.

Medline ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/) is available on and off campus and provides some of the features found in the SSCI. It is does not abstract as many different journals as are available in either PsychLIt or SSCI/SCI.