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Finding Full-Text, Peer Reviewed Psychology Articles: Search Psychology & Behavioral Science

This guide should help you in finding full-text, peer reviewed articles from JCCC library databases. If you continue to have difficulty in finding appropriate articles, call the Reference desk at 469-3178 for more assistance.

What's this database about??

Coverage:  child & adolescent psychology, psychiatry, psychology, mental processes, and experimental methods.  Titles:  530 peer-reviewed journals with selective full-text.  For some titles/issues, Full-text access is delayed (by months or year) due to publisher imposed RESTRICTIONS ("embargo").  Example:  Journal of Social Psychology, an 18 month delay.

Nota bene [note well]:  Publisher imposed embargo on article text availability appearing in various vendors' database products such as this one, EBSCO,  is common and it varies across many subject area disciplines & publication titles.

If you really want an article & the text is not offered due to embargo, there are several options:

  • See if the journal title is covered in one of JCCC's  other offered databases.  From the Library homepage,  select (left side) "Find Specific Journal".  Open the link, enter the journal title of interest and click search.  View other databases & their coverage limits as choices for the title you've identified.  Clicking your choice takes you to that database, defaults to the title & years covered. Find the year / issue needed and the article content should be there.
  • If the above fails and no other database delivers article text, you might request the item via Interlibrary Loan service,  It is free  and turn around is timely.   Find more details in their  brief policy FAQ.

Search Psychology & Behavioral Sciences

Click to search Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection

Take a second - - - scan the Advance Search screen layout, note various, available filter options, and the drop-down Field limiting options.  Article searching here is similar to that of Psych Articles but a bit less robust in some filtering features.  Example:  there are no filters for "empirical research," subject population or age group.

Explore the HELP menu choices, you will learn much about how to search and other tips & tricks.  [Reading "user manuals" or guides is really OK !!]

Think about your own research issue/topic and articles you would like to retrieve that might relate thereto. What ideas/relationships are most important in the context of your search; what subject elements are least important or unrelated.   Express your topic in a short, concisely worded sentence (or two);  this helps in parsing for key terminology and alternative synonyms.  My initial key idea is "teenagers" but on second thought I'm receptive to an alternative, "adolescents".

Example search topic:  I want to explore psychology writings focusing on issues of violence in dating relationships among college students. 

Key Concepts:  college students, dating, & violence.  Secondary terminology might be:  abuse or intimate relationships.

  • Open this database to begin.  Enter "college students" in quotes to preserve searching it as a word phrase. Choosing to search just the term, students, is broadly generic and would return results focusing on high school or elementary school students.  Also, as a single word - - - it is not a word phrase and would not require quotation marks.
  • From "Select a Field" you can target your term to searching in a specific record field  such as- - - title, abstract, author, or journal name.  Absent making a choice, the default for a non-qualified search focuses to the combined:  authors, all subject words, all title words, and the article's abstract summary field in any document record.  [Lots of fruitful, specific search areas for potential content relevancy.]
  • Know the importance of logic operators, AND, OR, NOT, and how they work for search linking purposes. In this example, leave the AND default unchanged. 
  • For terms remaining (dating, violence)  repeat steps above by entering them separately in the search boxes.  Some searches might require adding additional search boxes as necessary.
  • All most done.  As appropriate (or required) tag additional filters such as Full-Text and/or Peer-Reviewed.  You may consider applying date restrictions if needed or necessary.
  • Quickly scan for spelling errors or inconsistencies in logic such as intermixing AND, OR, NOT between search terms boxes when they shouldn't be.  If satisfied with the "big search picture,"  click SEARCH and go shopping for articles to review & evaluate.
  • Aftermath from viewing search results [the postmortem autopsy].  Adjust your search terms if you find better or more focused wording. Do the results reveal words & concepts which better represent your research problem and you hadn't thought of them previously?   Do your results show some search words are best represented in article titles or in the abstracts and total content, in context, gives the most relevant focus? 
  • You don't have to restrict all search statements to the field Default of making no choice. You can, with reasoned thinking, mix and match targeting certain search fields combinations. By trial & error what makes the most sense and gives the best results.  Example:  Is it important that some search terms be found (or should appear) in article titles only while other key terms may be searched as an author's name, or search word snippets in the article's abstract.  There's room for creativity in forming various combinations of which fields to search in the context of your research assignment,  what some early results reveal, causing changes in strategy and thinking.  [This is the "magic art" of searching.]

This rather basic search returned a number of useful results from this database.  Two example full-text articles are:

Strauss, Murray (2014).  'Intimate terrorism' and gender differences in injury of dating partners by male and female university students. Journal of Family Violence, 30(2). 189-199.

Hays, Danica G., et al., (2015).  Counseling with HEART: a relationship of violence prevention program for college students.  Journal of College Counseling, 18(1), 49-56.