Psychological & Brain Sciences
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Psych & Brain Sciences Librarian
Psychological & Brain Sciences Research Guide
This guide is intended to organize and highlight the resources available to the UMass Amherst community conducting research in the psychological and brain sciences. Many resources and services described here are only available to UMass Amherst community members with a NetID account. I do also include relevant resources available through the local, national, and international professional psychological organizations or that are available open access.
The University Libraries provide databases and collections in the various psychological disciplines that cover everything from peer-reviewed journals, Ph.D. dissertations, conference proceedings, psychology e-books, counseling and therapy sessions in video, famous experiments in psychology - documents and streaming examples, data visualization tools and more. This guide is not an exhaustive list of every resource that might contain psych information but instead a shortlist to get you started with the most relevant and widely-used resources in the field.
If you are looking for the list of databases that was previously the homepage of this guide, please click here.
Database Best Bets
When you need research articles, or more information on experimental design, or to consult the authoritative reference literature, these are the top places to start. Read the descriptions to pick the resource that best suits your need. Explore the Find Articles tab for more resources.
- PsycINFO This link opens in a new window
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Published by the American Psychological Association (APA), PsycINFO is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed journal literature in psychology, behavioral science and mental health. Access nearly 2,300 journals, 500,000 books records, 600 videos, and 3 million+ DOIs. Journals in nearly 30 languages. Publications from over 50 countries. Coverage dating back to the 1600s. - PubMed This link opens in a new window
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National Library of Medicine's comprehensive database of citations to medical journal articles, with links to UMass-subscribed full text, 1946-present. PubMed includes all MEDLINE content, plus content from additional journals and books in the life sciences. - Web of Science This link opens in a new window
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Index to articles from peer-reviewed journals in all disciplines.Search by cited reference, topic, author, and more. Arts and Humanities covers 1975-present; Social Sciences 1900-present; and Science 1900-present. - PsychiatryOnline This link opens in a new window
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Psychiatry Online features the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5) and The American Journal of Psychiatry as the cornerstones of a collection of psychiatric references. This resource also includes books, journals, medication information handouts for patients, clinical and research news, self-assessment tools, and previous editions of the DSM. - Psychological Experiments Online This link opens in a new window
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Multimedia online resource synthesizes the most important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries. Seventy-five hours of audio and video recordings of the original experiments with 40,000 pages of primary-source documents. Includes field notes, letters penned by the lead psychologists, videos of modern-day replications, and modifications to the original experiments.
Books on the Shelves
The Libraries' catalog, Discovery Search, provides a call number and location for each physical item. The call number consists of an alphanumeric string based on the Library of Congress classification system. View an example of how to read a call number.
Materials on psychology reside primarily in the BF call number range.
BF 1-990 Psychology (i.e.)
BF173-175.5 Psychoanalysis
BF309-499 Consciousness. Cognition
BF608-635 Will. Volition. Choice. Control
BF697-697.5 Differential psychology. Individuality. Self
BF also includes areas that would have been lumped in with psychology in the 1800s when the Library of Congress classification system was invented (i.e.).
BF839.8-885 Physiognomy. Phrenology
Neuroscience can be found primarily in the RC range, as class R is medicine.
RC321-571 Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Background Info
Background information on your topic can help you build better searches for finding sources. Find your topic in a dictionary or encyclopedia - or in the DSM - to discover more keywords and concepts to shape your approach to searching for sources.
- PsychiatryOnline This link opens in a new window
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Psychiatry Online features the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5) and The American Journal of Psychiatry as the cornerstones of a collection of psychiatric references. This resource also includes books, journals, medication information handouts for patients, clinical and research news, self-assessment tools, and previous editions of the DSM. - International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences This link opens in a new window
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Encyclopedia essays, with bibliographies, from experts on all aspects of the social sciences. Current. - Oxford Handbooks: Psychology This link opens in a new window
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Oxford Handbooks offer thorough introductions to topics and a critical survey of the current state of scholarship in psychology, creating an original conception of the field and setting the agenda for new research. The articles review the key issues and major debates, and provide an argument for how those debates might evolve. - Wiley Online Library This link opens in a new window
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Journals and reference works from publisher John Wiley.
Enter your search. On the Results page, click the radio button on the left to narrow your results to 'Reference works.'
Acknowledgement
This guide took inspiration from the ACRL Psychology Information Literacy Standards guide, approved at ALA Annual Conference, June 2010, and the APA Guidelines for the Undergraduate Psychology Major 3.0, approved by the APA Council of Representatives, August 2023.
