 So you're ready to begin finding scholarly articles for your psychology research project. Dank Library has a number of psychology-specific databases that will help you find strong academic research on your topic. To get started, first head to the library homepage at gordon.edu slash library. Scroll down to the search the library section and click on the databases tab. If you know the name of the database you're looking for, you can type it into the quick search box or you can click on the view all databases link to see a list of all databases we have access to at Dank's library. It's always a good idea to filter this list by subject when you're working on finding research for a specific subject area. In this case I'm going to filter our subjects list to psychology to see what useful databases we might have available. A yellow best bets box appears at the top of this filtered list. These three resources represent the best getting started places for research in the field of psychology. The one we're going to take a look at today is Psych Info. Remember that although we have different databases the search principles are largely the same across each database that you take a look at. Psych Info is one of the leading databases for research in the field of psychology. You can see from the description here that it's actually one of the world's largest resources devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. It's produced by the American Psychological Association, which you might actually know as APA, which brings us the citation style that we actually use for research in psychology. It's a very comprehensive database and it's a great place to begin searching on your topic. Let's get started. When we come to the main search interface in Psych Info you can see that we have search fields at the top. This is what we'll use to enter in the keywords that we want to use to search and then everything else on this page is about limiting how we want our results to appear. We'll talk about those limiting options in just a moment. Let's first begin by entering in our keywords. We're going to continue working with the example research question, how can pets help to reduce stress in college students? To begin finding information on our topic we're going to start with a keyword search. We want to identify the important terms within those research questions. We might think of pets and we're going to build in a synonym search using the word animals so I want to write in my search operator for. What this is saying to my database is search these two terms first give me articles that talk about pets or animals and then in my second line down I'm going to add in my second concept which is stress. I specifically want to know what are the articles that are talking about pets and stress and then finally as it relates to college students and we're going to build in another synonym to our college students we're going to say college students or university students. So I'm layering my search strategy here using two different search operators and and or. Remember or gives me both of my terms in my search and the and search operator connects all three of these concepts together so that I'm only getting articles that are discussing these three ideas. As we scroll down on the psych info search interface we can see that there are many different ways that we can limit our results. We have two of these limiters boxes checked for you already. They are print at Gordon and full Texan Epsco and all that means is that the research that you're going to be finding right now you'll have immediate access to. It's either going to be a PDF link or a web link or some other way that we're trying to connect you right away to the research. It's a great idea to begin your research in this place finding information that you can actually start reading right away. Do this so that you can start developing your keyword vocabulary. How do other scholars within this field discuss your topic. But remember these limiters are focusing on what Gordon has access to immediately. So at some point in your research it's a good idea to come back and uncheck these boxes and see what else am I missing as part of the scholarly conversation just by scoping to what Gordon has available. I'm going to go ahead and put these limiters back because right now I want to focus on what we have access to. One important checkbox to always remember to select in this limit your results section is the scholarly peer review journals checkbox. This is what helps our database focus on only academic research. Other useful limiting options that may come up depending on your topic area is the published date. You're able to limit and say I want research that's only published within the last 10 years. So you could enter in 2011 to 2021. You also might say that you want to focus in on a particular population group or age group in which the study was actually conducted. Other useful limiters include the methodology of the research study that was actually conducted. So for example you could limit to only clinical trials or empirical studies depending on the type of information you want. It's up to you which limiters you set. For now I'm going to limit to the last 10 years of research and scholarly peer review journals and start with these keywords that I've entered. I'm going to go ahead and click search. So in this first pass at research what I'm checking to see is how did I do with my first round of keywords. Am I close by the keywords that I've brainstormed from my research question to get me near the type of research that I'm looking for. And from a couple of these articles I can see that I'm on the right track. This first one a dog on way to reduce stress and animal assisted intervention with college students. That sounds pretty promising. As you scroll through these first list of results keep track of the articles that are interesting to you but also take notes of the different keywords that appear either in the title, the abstract or the subject terms here on the brief record of the article. And you can start using that to build your own keyword vocabulary. We're going to jump into the first article in our search results to take a look at the article's record. When you click on the article's record you can learn a lot more about what this article is discussing, who's publishing it, etc. We've got the title of the article at the top, the authors including their credentials, where they're publishing from, the source or journal that it comes from in this case college student journal. And as we scroll down we get a list of potential keywords. These are terms that kind of summarize what this article is about and then we get the abstract. The abstract is the summary of the article that we're taking a look at. This is a great place to begin asking yourself is this article relevant to my research question? You can read the abstract and get a pretty good idea of this is something that you're going to use for your research. Scrolling down on this page you can see there's a lot of other fields here including most of the fields that were in our limit results options on the search page such as population, age group, the methodology of the research study, publication type and more. All of these equate to different ways in which we can narrow down our fields of research. And because we're searching in our database with the full text limiters on the option to click on the pdf or full text link will always be on the left hand column under the detailed record header. We're going to go ahead and click on this pdf full text and you can see the full article from here from here we can download save it wherever we'd like and use it later.