INTRODUCTION

Hello. I'm Robert Monge, the Instruction Librarian at Western Oregon University. This website is set up to walk you through the process of finding professional research sources for your Psychology 489 Human/Animal Bond Paper. Along the way, I’ll introduce you to some advanced research skills that will make finding information a little bit easier.

YOUR RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT

To start with, let’s look at the research assignment requirements for your final paper:

+ 6 professional references cited in APA style (2000-2010).
+ These references may include professionally edited books, journals and one website.
+ Your textbook can NOT count for a reference, nor can any textbook.

To restate this: You need to find 6 sources between 2000-2010. You can use journal articles, one web source and books (provided they are not textbooks). All sources need to be cited in the APA.

Even though you only need 6 sources for your final paper, I suggest finding anywhere from 15-20 good sources that you can use. You are not going to use all 15-20 sources. What you are looking for is the best 6 sources out of the 15-20.  

Does 15-20 seem like too many sources? Keep in mind that both research and writing often change your thoughts about a subject. It is good to have multiple viewpoints and sources to help you sort out what your final position will be on the subject. 

Considering the assignment requirements, journal articles will make up most of your research.

I suggest starting with PsychINFO. This database has over 2 million scholarly journal articles in psychology and related disciples. Plus, 97 percent of the material is peer-reviewed.  

If you don’t know what peer-reviewed articles are, this is a great site that explains the process.

 This video will show you how to search PsycINFO to get articles for your final paper [6 minutes] 

After you have gone through this lesson, search PsycINFO and try to find 2-4 articles related to your topic.

Once you have a few articles, you can use the Reference page as a source for finding additional articles related to your topic that may not have come up in your database search.

I want to stress the importance of this skill. Good researchers always look at reference pages to find articles that will help them with their own research.

This video will show you how to find articles using a reference page [10 minutes] 

Are you familiar with Google Scholar? You should be. It is not Google…meaning it doesn’t bring back a list of websites as search results. However, it is does bring back a collection of scholarly articles and books.

It also has two unique features: Cited by and Related Articles

This video will show you how to use Google Scholar [10 minutes]

While journal articles will make up the most of your research, don’t dismiss books as a valid source for information.  Journal articles focus on specific aspects of a subject. They are limited by page length and can’t provide broad in-depth coverage of topics. Books can go into more detailed aspects of a subject and provide a deep look at various topics.

I'm sure you know how to search the Internet, but did you know you can search only goverment sites or by organizations? You can limit to just PDF documents. You can also search by different countries to get a more in depth look at what's on the web.

Here is how to Advance Google Search.

Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab -- APA Formating and Style Guides

The APA Style Aid provides formatting, in-text citation and reference page assistance.

NoodleBib is a tool to help you write your reference or works cited page in correct MLA, APA, or Chicago format.