PSYC 101 - General Psychology - Mills

Your assignment requires you to locate three sources and write APA-style citations for them.  You need to have a book, a scholarly article, and a website from a .gov or .edu extension.  This page will help you with locating the three sources.  For information about constructing the citations, see the "APA Citation" page in this guide.  

Help with citation questions is available from the library and the tutoring center.  See the "Ask!" page in this guide for contact information and more details.  

Use the library catalog to search for books.  The library has both print and ebooks available.  In addition to the tips shown here, you can scroll down to the bottom of this page for a brief video tutorial on using the catalog.  

Search Tips

• As with the library databases, use single words or short phrases when searching the catalog. 
• However, unlike the databases, you can put several keywords in one box.  
  • For instance, if you want books about the psychology of addiction, you can put "addiction psychology" (or "psychology addiction"--the order of the words doesn't matter).
• Think about your topic in broad terms--there may not be a whole book that is entirely about your focused topic, but there probably is a book about a broader topic that your focused topic fits into.
  • For instance, if you're planning to write about behaviorism in the elementary school classroom, you might try searching "behaviorism elementary education."  Unfortunately, there are no results. 
  • However, you can get a lot of results by searching for just "behaviorism," or "psychology education."  Many of the books that come up on these searches are likely to have information you can use in your paper.  

Warning!

The catalog also includes things other than books, like periodicals and audiovisual materials.  For this assignment, you'll need to make sure that the item you select is a book!  You can use the "material type" filter on your results page to limit your results to books, ebooks, or both, as shown below:

Next, you will need to use the library databases to locate a scholarly article.  You can find more information about databases and scholarly articles on the "Welcome" page of this guide, and on the "Scholarly Article Review" page.  

Search Tips

Searching the databases requires different techniques than Google or other internet searching.

• Select the "advanced search" screen, to get multiple search boxes.
• Use single words or short phrases that express a single concept, rather than sentences, questions, or long phrases with multiple concepts.
  • For instance, phrases like "social media" or "body image" are OK keywords because they express one concept: an article about that topic will probably have those words next to each other. 
  • "Why teenage girls struggle with body image" is a long phrase with several concepts; it should be broken up into individual keywords.
• Put each concept in a separate search box
• Keep the "And" connector between the search boxes
• You can use "or" within the search box to connect multiple terms for the same concept
  • For instance, you could put "teenagers OR adolescents OR young adults"
• Filter your results for full text, scholarly articles.

Databases to Try

Finally, your assignment asks you to find a source from a government website or a reliable non-government organization. 

One of the easiest ways to find government sources is to use Google, and limit your search to sites with a .gov address.    Simply type your search string, followed by this exact command: site:.gov

Be sure to include the colon (:) after the word "site"--that's how the search engine knows that it's a command, not another word to search.  Here's an example of how it looks:

In this example, the search terms are "electric cars environmental impact."  The command "site:.gov" tells the search engine to look only at sites with a .gov address.  

To search for organization websites, do the same thing, but with the command site:.org