Off The Shelf

PsycBOOKS added the following titles to its coverage list in April 2009. Of the titles added, one was an APA book and nineteen were designated classic books.  Classic books are landmark titles in psychology and are selected by APA experts.

APA Books

1. Transcending self-interest: Psychological explorations of the quiet ego,
© 2008, by Wayment, Heidi A. (Ed); Bauer, Jack J. (Ed)

Classic Books

1. Adjustment to physical handicap and illness: A survey of the social
psychology of physique and disability, © 1946, by Barker, Roger G.; Wright, Beatrice A.; Gonick, Mollie R.

2. Basic statistical concepts, © 1955, by Adams, Joe Kennedy

3. Basic statistics, © 1963, by Kurtz, Thomas E.

4. Elements of statistical inference, © 1961, by Huntsberger, David V.

5. Fatigue and impairment in man, © 1947, by Bartley, S. Howard; Chute, Eloise

6. The forty-ninth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of
Education, Part 1: Learning and instruction, © 1950, by Henry, Nelson B. (Ed)

7. Introduction to statistical inference, © 1957, by Li, Jerome C. R.

8. Introduction to the statistical method: Foundations and use in the
behavioral sciences, © 1962, by Hammond, Kenneth R.; Householder, James E.

9. A laboratory manual for social psychology, © 1951, by Ray, Wilbert S.

10. Personality change and development: As measured by the projective
techniques, © 1958, by Harrower, Molly

11. Statistical inference, © 1953, by Walker, Helen M.; Lev, Joseph

12. Statistical methods in educational and psychological research, © 1954,
by Wert, James E.; Neidt, Charles O.; Ahmann, J. Stanley

13. Statistical principles in experimental design, © 1962, by Winer, B. J.

14. Statistics: An intuitive approach, © 1962 (Reprinted 1964), by Weinberg,
George H.; Schumaker, John A.

15. Stress and disease, © 1953, by Wolff, Harold G.

16. Sweet madness: A study of humor, © 1963, by Fry Jr., William F.

17. The teaching and learning of psychotherapy, © 1958 (Reprinted 1959), by
Ekstein, Rudolf; Wallerstein, Robert S.

18. Theory of equations, © 1954, by MacDuffee, Cyrus Colton

19. The Wechsler-Bellevue Scales: A guide for counselors, ©1953, by
Patterson, C. H

 Note: To read any of these ebook go to the Articles, Books & More page. Scroll down to PsycBOOKS and type in the title.

– Erika

If you’re reading this, you’ve figured out how to get to a blog.  But how much to you know about “microblogging?”

Or the biggest name in microblogging today: Twitter?

Twitter lets you quickly send out a short message of 140 characters, called a tweet.  Then anyone who is signed up to receive your tweets gets to read it.  You can create a network of friends who all watch each others’ tweets, or you can join the multitude following the moment-by-moment details of the lives of the famous.

Twitter may have started as a fast way for people to quickly update all their friends at once, but it has quickly moved beyond that.  With 6 million users, a recent Business Week article looks at some of the possibilities for businesses who want to tap that market.

Politicians have also joined the Twitter craze.  The Obama campaign ran its own Twitter stream, and the president got to be the subject (or not) of tweets when other pols used Twitter to comment during his speech.

Not sure how this will ever apply to your academic or professional life?  Think again.  Twitter is making inroads at professional and academic conferences, with audience members pouring out streams of tweets about what’s going on.   The ALA Annual Conference, where thousands of librarians meet to discuss things like Twitter,  isn’t even happening until July, and it’s already got quite a long list of tweets.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t Twitter.   If you read my blog posts, you’ll know that I can’t contain myself to only 140 characters.  And, like many others who work in academia, I have a real soft spot for long, analytical discussions with footnotes.  Not exactly tweet material.

Still, even if you don’t Twitter yourself, you may need to be aware of it in future.  If this trend really catches on,  you may be in the dark without it.

In the meantime, you can revel in your luddite attitude while watching this funny YouTube video from Current.

- Erin

Scholarly, peer reviewed, juried, refereed..… When referring to a professional journal or article, all these terms mean the same thing – the article content has been rigorously  reviewed and evaluated by a committee of subject experts and given the seal of approval for academic publishing. 

Now let’s imagine if we take that peer review process and put it to work in an elementary school.  The Onion (a weekly satirical newspaper publishing fake news for our entertainment) did just that. 

Please do enjoy The Onion’s article on the unforgiving fifth-grade peer review process.

Fifth-grade peer review

On a more educational note – if you would like to learn more about the REAL peer review process and how to find peer-reviewed journals and articles, check out the following Capella Library tutorial and accompanying PDF to learn what peer-reviewed journals are, how to find them in a library database, and where to look and find a journal’s peer-reviewed status.

What are Peer-reviewed Articles & How do I Find Them? (Flash with audio)
What are Peer-reviewed Articles & How do I Find Them? (PDF)

- Jennie

I remember the first time I  reviewed a  a dissertation, I thought while this looks  impressive  it also looks very long,  where do I start? I knew I probably did not have the time to read the whole document.  So what parts of a dissertation will help you the most in doing research for your own dissertation?  Here are some suggestions.

Chapter Two (The Literature Review)  and the Reference List of the dissertation can be invaluable, especially if that dissertation is current and very closely related to your topic.  You may get ideas of  how to structure your review and also possible resources you want to review.  How do you tell if a reference  is in the Capella Library?  Use  the Journal and Book Locator link from the Library Home page.  If it’s not in the Library, you can get it through Interlibrary Loan.

Chapter Three (Methodology) Having  trouble understanding or explaining the methodology you are using for your study? Looking at dissertations that have used that same methodology may help you gain a better understanding of your chosen methodology,  perhaps also  in the context of  your topic.

Chapter Five Having trouble  figuring out your research question? Chapter Five contains the author’s suggestions for future research, its a great place to look  for ideas.

I hope some of these suggestions make using dissertations in your research more manageable, let us know if you have others!

Robin

Erin recently blogged Are You Fooled by Bad Resources? Well it turns out journalists and sports reporters who didn’t take time to fact check have found themselves on the foolish side of Wikipedia-based social experiments.

Shane Fitzgerald, an undergraduate student in Ireland, wanted to see what would happen if he posted a fake quote by a recently deceased French music composer. What he expected was to see the contrived quote in online blogs and other informal locations on the Internet. However he found the quote used in newspapers across the globe, including “obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.” (From May 6, 2009 Irish Times article)

Fitzgerald said, “He wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source and how people are connected especially through the internet…” (From May 6, 2009 Irish Times article).  No one actually discovered the hoax until Fitzgerald himself alerted the offending newspapers of their faux pas. Fitzgerald emphasized that he’s not necessarily technologically savvy, proving that anyone with a computer and Internet connection can change the content of Wikipedia.

Earlier this year another Wikipedia hoax fooled British sports news reporters. A fake soccer phenom from Moldova was concocted and the British newspapers bit: Inside the ingenious hoax that fooled the British sports press.

In the soccer hoax a blogger thought something was fishy and he looked at Wikipedia history pages (where you can view all of the edits done to a Wikipedia page) and tapped other sources in the know and discovered the truth. There was no phenom Moldovan soccer player named Masal Bugduv.

This all goes to show how wary one must be when viewing content on the Internet. It’s important not to take things at face value and do a little investigating and critically evaluate information. It’s also good to keep in mind that many published newspapers and magazines with tight deadlines and budgets don’t always take the time to thoroughly fact check their content.

What can you do? Look for story retractions in later issues, or find other resources that reported the same story. But check their sources. Do a Google search of that quote or story. If it comes up with a page from Wikipedia that includes a quote or information without a reference attached, then be wary.

While Wikipedia can be useful for background information, it should never be cited or used as a source. Use it for keywords, not for content.

No discussion about Wikipedia would be complete without a visit from Stephen Colbert, the inventor of the term Wikiality. Here’s the video of Stephen Colbert’s take on Wikipedia from the segment of his show (The Colbert Report) called The Word: The Word – Wikiality.

From The Colbert Nation: http://www.colbertnation.com/

-Sommer

Finding scholarly articles is tough to do through Google.   Why is that? 

Simply put, the journal publishing industry is a lot like the music industry.  They want to get paid for their content.   You’ve probably had the experience where you find the perfect article through a search engine like Yahoo or Google, but then it takes you to the publisher’s website.  They demand $20-$30 per article!

It’s ok to start your research by gathering a little background info online, but for scholarly articles, Capella Library is the way to go.   We have purchased tens of thousands of exclusive peer reviewed journals on your behalf.

Here is how our collection compares. 

According to Ullrichsweb.com, there are only about 4000 scholarly journals that are published “open access” or freely online.  Meanwhile, the library has over 30,000 scholarly journals, chosen exclusively for Capella’s programs.

Take our tour of the library to get started.  Your research will be much easier, quicker and more efficient when you start with a direct library search.

– Erika

Many times when working on a paper or some other project your instructor asks you to use only primary resources.

What do they mean?

Primary resources are published research studies. They include the following sections:  a research question, brief literature review, description of the study’s methodology, a discussion of results and any conclusions.  If an article does not have these elements in some way, shape, or form it is probably either a secondary or tertiary resource.

How do you tell the difference?

Secondary resources evaluate either one or perhaps a group of primary resources. They do not conduct a research study but comment on studies that others have done. They are often called a synthesis or an analysis or literature review of a particular subject. They can be are great resources for finding primary resources on a subject.

Tertiary resources provide background or overview information on a topic. They are resources such as subject specific encyclopedias, handbooks or dictionaries.  Do these resources sound to ” non-academic”  for your purposes? Well don’t discount them so quickly. Many times they will remind you of aspects of your topic you may have forgotten.  Also they can give you different ideas for talking about and describing your topic that may be helpful when you start searching the library  databases.

Not sure what you have in your hands? Feel free to Ask-a- Librarian

Robin

While searching the library databases, you may have noticed that not everything is available in full text from the library. Why is that? Is it because the librarians want to annoy you?

No, of course not. There are several reasons that you may not have access to the full text you want. Some are economic, some are historical, and some are a bit of both. Here are some of the common reasons you may run into article records with only an abstract:

• When computerized databases first appeared, they couldn’t handle full text. The technology just wasn’t ready yet, so the index without full text is what showed up first.
• There isn’t as much demand to digitize back in time. Most journals today automatically create a copy for online distribution, but digitizing everything from 1974 is not a very pressing priority.
• Including older items raises the cost of library databases, even though the older content is in the least demand. Libraries have a hard enough time paying for recent content, so database companies are reluctant to raise prices just to include older stuff.
• Some current journals are so expensive that the database companies don’t include them in their packages. When a journal subscription can cost as much as a small car, adding everything can make a database unaffordable to libraries.
• Journals want to push paper sales. If a journal has an embargo, which stops the database from having the most recent issues, libraries are “forced” to buy both the paper journal and the digital version.
• Some journals want to do all full-text sales themselves. They’re happy to let people learn that a journal article exists, but they also want to maximize the profit from the full text.

Even though you’re using these databases as part of your education, the academic publishing industry is a business. That’s an important fact to remember whenever you are looking at information – knowledge isn’t just power, it’s also money as well. And that will affect what you can access and when.

- Erin

A blog at The Scientist magazine recently reported on a “fake” peer-reviewed journal that drug manufacturer Merck created along with the help of well-known academic publisher Elsevier. The journal was handed out to medical professionals as a way to advertise several Merck products.

The journal in question, the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, had the appearance of a typical scholarly journal, but it wasn’t.

It may have fooled a few doctors, but knowledgeable researchers could quickly tell that it wasn’t what it appeared to be.

What tipped them off?

• It wasn’t indexed in MEDLINE, the database a researcher would expect to see it indexed in.
• There was no website where researchers could find further information about the journal’s contents or submission procedures.
• The ads and articles were weighted heavily toward Merck products.
• Review and meta-analysis articles had very few references.

Could you spot a bogus journal or article?

We all like to think that we’re hard to fool, but unless you have a strong understanding of the literature in your field, you may actually be pretty gullible. The Capella librarians are often asked questions about how to analyze an article, and we often see articles that aren’t up to the standards that learners want to use.

While it’s unlikely that you’ll run across a journal purposely designed to fool you, there are other items that you should avoid using when doing scholarly research:

• Course papers by other students. These are all over the web, some even listed in Google Scholar.
• Non-peer-reviewed content from peer-reviewed journals. Things like book reviews and commentaries are in the journal, but not peer-reviewed themselves.
• Websites on your topic. They are tempting because they’ll often give a nice overview of a topic, and may even be by an expert. But they are NOT the same as a scholarly article that is posted to the internet.
• Marketing articles. Just as with Merck, many companies use articles or newsletters to advertise their services or products. They mix marketing messages with more general information to pull in readers and subtly influence them.
• Trade journals. Don’t get me wrong, trade journals and other professional literature are great, but they’re not the same as a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. You need to make sure you have the right resource for the task at hand.

Of course, the best way to protect yourself from being fooled is knowledge. Know what scholarly articles look like. Know what is going on in your field. Know who might want to fool you.

- Erin

Many of you are fans of the Capella Library guide Bibliography Mining and Cited Reference Searching and may have seen my recent blog post titled Cited Reference Searching now in ProQuest Databases! Well cited reference searching is now a feature in the Science Direct – Social and Behavioral Sciences database (located on the Articles, Books and More page along with all the other Library databases).

Science Direct’s cited reference searching works somewhat differently than the other databases, as the “cited by” link is not on the results list but rather a button on the article information page (not the PDF).

So for example when you’re looking at a list of results in Science Direct you would click on the linked Article Title. When you’ve clicked the article title you’ll view a page similar to the below mini screen shot. The Cited By link is to the right of the article title on this page (highlighted in yellow):

Upon clicking on the Cited By link you’ll view the articles in the Science Direct database that cited the original article you were viewing.

We will update the Bibliography Mining & Cited Reference Searching guide to include ProQuest and Science Direct as soon as possible. But for now refer to this blog post and the Cited Reference Searching now in ProQuest Databases! post for guidance. Ask a Librarian if you have questions!

-Sommer