Off The Shelf

Have you been scouring the Internet and the library databases looking for that perfect measurement instrument for your research study? For your dissertation? How do you know if it’s a quality instrument and if it’s the right instrument for you? 

Check out this article from the January 2007 issue of gradPSYCH –

“Finding the right tools: Student researchers need to know what to look for in a measurement instrument.”

This article will outline the steps you need to complete when choosing an instrument, including:

• Knowing what you need and what you need to measure.
• Befriending your librarian
• Doing some quality control
• Getting permission

The library has access to all four of the databases mentioned in this article: Mental Measurements Yearbook, Tests in Print, PsycINFO, and Health and Psychosocial Instruments.  You can access these databases from the library’s Articles, Books, and More web page.

For more information on finding tests and measures in the Capella Library, please review  the guide Finding Tests and Survey Instruments on the library’s Guides and Tutorials page (scroll down to Resources for Doctoral Learners).

If you have any questions, please contact us in the library!

~Jennie

Well it’s time for another colloquium in Atlanta. If you’re heading to the Atlanta colloquium, be sure to attend the library session on your schedule. We’ve received feedback that library sessions are one of the most valuable at colloquia for various reasons.

• Unaware of all of the resources and services available to you as a Capella learner.
• Search tricks and techniques can drastically change the relevance and quantity of your results.
• Get a chance to have your most burning questions answered.
• Find out librarians are real people, not robots, who are research experts and here to help you learn to become a more efficient researcher.

(For those of you not in a PhD program attending colloquia, we encourage you to contact a Capella librarian to learn something new today!)

See you in Hotlanta!

-Sommer

Often times I get calls from learners who want an overview of a topic or perhaps a theory. They are inclined to turn to journal articles.  However journal articles tend to focus on very specific questions and often do not have the broad overview you may be looking for.  So where do you turn?

The Library has a database called Gale Virtual Reference that has many subject specific encyclopedias in areas such as education, psychology, business, criminology and many other areas. The articles in these encyclopedias are often lengthy and written by experts in the field. For example if you do a search under the words “research methods” (putting the words in quotation marks to search as a phrase) one of the many articles that comes up is from the Encyclopedia of  Education.  It is 18 pages long and gives a good overview of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research.

So if you are having trouble understanding a concept and need an overview or definition this is a great place to start. Reading the article will also give ideas for other words that describe the concept and that you may want to use in searching for further information.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

If you have other questions about this resource Ask-a-Librarian.

Robin

PsycBOOKS added the following titles to its coverage list in August 2009. Of the titles added, 4 were APA books and 20 were designated classic books. Classic books are landmark titles in psychology and are selected by APA experts.

APA Book

1. Clinical health psychology in medical settings: A practitioner’s guidebook (2nd ed.), © 2009, by Belar, Cynthia D.; Deardorff, William W.

2. Consulting psychology: Selected articles by Harry Levinson, © 2009, by Levinson, Harry; Freedman, Arthur M. (Ed.); Bradt, Kenneth H. (Ed.)

3. Financial success in mental health practice: Essential tools and strategies for practitioners, © 2009, by Walfish, Steven; Barnett, Jeffrey E.

4. Treatment of chronic medical conditions: Cognitive-behavioral therapy strategies and integrative treatment protocols, © 2009, by Sperry, Len

Classic Books

5. Elements of criticism, with analyses and translations of ancient and foreign illustrations (new ed.), © 1833, by Home, Henry; Mills, Abraham (Ed.)

6. Elements of intellectual philosophy, designed as a text-book (2nd ed.), © ND  (reprinted 1828), by Upham, Thomas C.

7. Elements of moral philosophy (2nd ed., rev. and improved), © 1835, by Parkhurst, John L.

8. The elements of moral science (2nd ed.), © 1835, by Wayland, Francis

9. Elements of psychology: Included in a critical essay of Locke’s essay on the human understanding, © 1834, by Cousin, Victor; Henry, C. S. (Trans.)

10. Essays on the powers of the human mind, Vol. 1, © 1803, by Reid, Thomas

11. An inquiry into the modern prevailing notions respecting that freedom of will which is supposed to be essential to moral agency, virtue and vice, reward and punishment, praise and blame (a new edition), © 1831, by Edwards, Jonathan

12. Introduction to the history of philosophy, © 1832, by Cousin, Victor; Linberg, Henning Gotfried (Trans.)

13. Moral essays contain’d in several treatises on many important duties, Vol. 3 (3rd ed. with amendments) and Vol. 4 contained in two treatises, © 1696, by Nicole, Pierre

14. Moral essays, contain’d in several treatises on many important duties, Vol. 1 (3rd ed. with amendments) and Vol. 2 (2nd ed.), © 1696, by Nicole, Pierre

15. Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin, MD, © 1798, by Brown, Thomas

16. Occasional discourses, including several never before published, © 1833, by Wayland, Francis

17. Of  wisdom: The second and third books (2nd ed.), © 1707, by Charron, Sieur de; Stanhope, George (Trans.)

18-19. On the power wisdom and goodness of God as manifested in the adaptation of external nature to the moral and intellectual constitution of man, Vol. I-II, © 1833, by Chalmers, Thomas

20. The philosophy of the human voice: Embracing its physiological history; together with a system of principles, by which criticism in the art of elocution may be rendered intelligible, and instruction, definite and comprehensive: To which is added a brief analysis of song and recitative (2nd ed. enlarged), © 1833, by Rush, James

21. The philosophy of the moral feelings, © 1833, by Abercrombie, John

22. The principles of physiology applied to the preservation of health, and to the improvement of physical and mental education, © 1834, by Combe, Andrew

23. A treatise of the passions and faculties of the soul of man, with the several dignities and corruptions thereunto belonging, © 1656, by Reynolds, Edward

24. A view of the elementary principles of education, founded on the study of the nature of man,  © 1832, by  Spurzheim, G.

Note: To read any of the these ebooks – go to the Articles, Books, and More page.  Scroll down to PsycBOOKs and type in the title.

~ Jennie

If you have a specific title in mind, you can always check Journal and Book Locator and search for that title.  But did you know that you can also run a search to find all the journals in the library that have certain keywords in their titles?  For instance, if you want to see if we have journals about sports psychology, you can run the following search:

Journal and Book Locator search

(sport* will search for any word that starts with the word sport: sport, sports, sporting, etc.)

 You will get the following four results.  Note that two of them are not located in databases that you can find on the Articles, Books and More page:

Journal and Book Locator Results

This brings me to another method you can use to find articles from our stand alone journals:  Search databases with the Full Text box unchecked.  Most databases actually index more journals than they include full text.  By searching with the full text feature off, you will get additional results.  In fact, if you’re a doctoral learner working on your dissertation, we recommend that you always search the databases with the full text limiter turned off to make sure that you are conducting a thorough search of the literature.

When you run a search without limiting to full text, you will then naturally get some results that will not have a full text link.  Instead, some of the results will say Check Article Linker or Linked Full Text (Ebsco databases) or Link to full text (ProQuest).  Simply click on the link to see if the article is available in either another database or from one of our stand alone journals.

To continue with our sports psychology theme, you would pick an appropriate database for your topic, in this case PsycINFO, and then run a search such as the one below, making sure to uncheck the full text limiter:

PsyINFO database search

Now, even though PsycINFO doesn’t include the full text for the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, we can pull up results for it (and other stand alone journals) because PsycINFO does index it.  Simply click on the link to get to the full text:

PsycINFO search results

As always, if you have questions about article searching, Ask a Librarian! 

 -Kim 

While we all know to read critically any information we locate on the free world wide web, sometime there’s a tendency to forget to read critically when it comes to published magazines and journals. Especially when it comes to Peer Reviewed journals, as they are referred to as the Gold Standard of Academic Publishing.

But as shown in this humorous account from professor Dr. Rick Trebino about attempting to publish in one of those journals, there clearly is room for bias and missing opposing voices. Dr. Trebino attempted to publish a comment to a scientific study published in the “most prestigious journal” of his field that he found to have drawn conclusions on badly calculated data. When he attempts to publish a comment pointing out that the study is wrong and how, a very long and ridiculous process ensued.

The reason this sadly funny situation is important is because it points out that bias does exist and some voices are not heard in scholarly publishing, and mistakes do happen and make their way through peer review onto the printed page. Always reading critically looking at the conclusions the researchers have drawn, the research methodology they used and how well they executed it, the data collected, and other aspects of scholarly papers is a good practice. The fact that the paper Dr. Trebino discredited was published in the first place shows that even when a study is reviewed by 3 scholarly reviewers, mistakes do make their way to publication only to be refuted later.

-Sommer

I don’t know about you but databases and Web sites  that store statistics always intimidate me. One of the best sources of education statistics  is the National Center for Education Statistics  (NCES) which is frequently updated by the US Dept of Education and Institute of Education Sciences. I recently found a tool on this site, that makes navigation of the wealth of  information available more manageable.  Its called Data Search Tools, you can access this information by clicking Help – Search Guides from the first page of the Web site or click here

Here are a couple of examples of easy searches for the following information:

Public School and School District Search – Obtain the correct name, address, phone number, NCES ID number, and other student and teacher characteristics of a public school or public school district anywhere in the nation.

Data State Education Profiles- Search for statewide information in elementary/secondary education, postsecondary education and selected demographics for all states in the U.S.

Check out the other options.  I know finding this help reduced some of my “anxiety”  related to finding information on this site.

Need further assistance finding statistical information in Education or any other discipline? Check out the Library Research Guides for Specific Schools,  each has a section of statistical resources.

Or Ask-a-Librarian

Robin

Today has been named International Literacy Day by UNESCO.   As lifelong learners, you already know that literacy is central to meeting your goals.  And what is literacy without Information Literacy? 

Librarians use the term Information Literacy to refer to the basket of skills that allow you to find, evaluate, use, and cite information.  Reading alone isn’t enough to be a savvy user of information.

So why not celebrate your literacy by spending some time with a good read?  Here are some options for those who want to take a break from the academic fare, and perhaps spread literacy to others:

• International Children’s Digital Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Google Books
• Find a Public Library

- Erin

Imagine you are in a library.  As you walk through the library the books all disappear, only to return three hours later, as if nothing happened.

Or, you find an item on the shelf.  You pull it down, open the book, and instead of the text you find the following: 404 Error  Page Not Found.   You open the next one and suddenly an advertisement for cheap pharmaceuticals starts playing.

Okay, so that’s never going to happen.  But it happens every day on the internet.  Focused on providing immediate content, the internet doesn’t have a great archive.  Things come and go.  And as we transfer ever greater quantities of information (and hackers become more sophisticated), the system can simply shut down.

The reference librarians at Capella use the internet daily, so we’re well aware of the frequency of losses.  In fact, whenever the Google search engine stops working–which is more often than you think –we laugh about how we broke Google (that should give you an idea of Librarian humor). 

There have been some other high-profile internet service problems lately: Twitter was taken down by a hacker and gmail stopped working entirely for a while.    This sort of loss of service can be a real bummer if you let your friends’ Tweets coordinate your social activities, or you’ve placed your entire life on Google’s servers. 

But how does this impact your academic life?  What does it mean for research? 

Library databases are similar to the internet in this respect.  There’s no guarantee that a journal will remain a part of any particular database, and only a portion of journals have digitized all the way back to volume 1, issue 1.   But as long as you’ve got a citation, you can use alternative methods to dig up a journal article.

Open internet pages are a completely different beast.  They may exist in only one form: that single internet page.  And that page can disappear at any time.  In fact, many links go missing after only a few months or years, which is just the blink of an eye in the world of academic research.

But that same item may continue as a citation in a bibliography that no one can check.   Something can be misinterpreted or misquoted by a single author, but because no one can check it, the misuse is the only use that lives on.

Similarly, an internet world where things disappear quickly is a world where people may be reinventing the wheel . . . every few years.  Researchers are subject to fads, just like everyone else, so a ‘hot topic’ from 1999 can show up again in 2009, but no one can find the results of the previous round of interest.

This isn’t something new.  The fall of the Roman Empire caused the ‘loss’ of a lot of information – from the writings of ancient philosophers to the recipe for concrete.  The Western world survived that loss of information, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about what impermanence means for research today.

- Erin

Erika and I conducted the first Capella University Library RefWorks online seminar today, and we’ve scheduled some upcoming sessions that you can register at the RefWorks information page (linked from the Library Homepage). Just click on the Sign up for a live RefWorks online seminar! link.

At the session we cover the following:

1. Creating a personal account
2. Getting references into RefWorks
3. Organizing with folders
4. Navigating RefWorks
5. Building APA Bibliographies

In the meantime, check out these recommended RefWorks guides:

• RefWorks Basic Features
• Importing from the Library Databases

Questions? Ask a Librarian!

-Sommer