LibGuides: Psychology: Journal Articles

Best Databases for Psychology

PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
Great for most topics in psychology including clinical, positive, abnormal, aging, and organizational psyc topics. Includes over three million citations of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations, and technical reports.
PubMed This link opens in a new window
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Great for evolutionary, biological, or cognitive psychology topics. Contains over 22 million citations to biomedical literature including empirical research, literature reviews, and other articles.
Psychology (Gale OneFile) This link opens in a new window
Popular magazines and selected journal articles in psychology.

Accessing Full Text

In PsycINFO:

If you don't see a PDF button or icon, look for a "Find@CSUDH" button on the left side of the page. This will search our full-text options for anywhere we might have the article (such as another database) in a separate page.

In PubMed:

Look for your access options in the top right of each article page. Use the Find@CSUDH and "Free PMC Article" to find resources for free through the CSUDH Library. PubMed also provides links to the publisher to pay for the article.

Google Scholar is a search tool where you can find scholarly sources like peer-reviewed articles, dissertations, theses, and books with Google's simple look and feel. Add CSUDH in Library Links to connect Google Scholar to OneSearch to get the full text through our library subscriptions. You can also use Google Scholar to find freely available PDFs, trace citations, look up authors profiles and journal metrics, and generate a citation.

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Advanced Search Tips

In PsycINFO you will find options to narrow your search by age of the population studied, methodology, and gender on the left side of your results page. Click on any of the options to expand and select checkboxes. Using methodology is a great way to narrow to just empirical articles or just literature reviews for background research.

In PsycINFO & PubMed look for the official tags for what the article is about underneath the abstract. These will often be listed as "subject terms" or "MeSH terms" and use the professional language for the concepts in the article. Clicking on any of the terms will lead you to more articles on the same topic. This can be especially useful depending on your topic. For example, if you use "shopping addiction" as a keyword you will find that most of the articles are tagged with "behavior, addictive" and/or "compulsive shopping." Using the official term of "Behavior, addictive" or "compulsive shopping" will help you find more relevant results you may not have found otherwise.

Other Useful Databases

Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
Education Source This link opens in a new window
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A comprehensive education resource with full-text coverage in all fields of education including higher education, school leadership, early childhood, and teacher education.
SAGE Research Methods This link opens in a new window
SAGE Research Methods is the ultimate methods library with more than 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, and instructional videos by world-leading academics from across the social sciences, including the largest collection of qualitative methods books available online from any scholarly publisher.
Social Sciences Full Text This link opens in a new window
An interdisciplinary resource for finding scholarly articles in the social sciences including anthropology, communications, education, gender studies, psychology, sociology, and social work.
Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Research resources in sociology and related fields. Sociological Abstracts is great at finding international journals on a particular topic.

Access all these databases and more on the library's Article Databases webpage where you can sort all 200+ databases by subject and material type.