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Finding Full-Text, Peer Reviewed Psychology Articles: Science Direct (College Edition)

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.

About Science Direct (College Edition)

Resource offers selective full-text coverage of scholarly journals in psychology specifically as well as other disciplines in social sciences & humanities.  Otherwise, Science Direct's  strengths are coverage in life/health sciences, medicine, engineering, and technology.  Coverage in psychology numbers 170 titles.  For some journal titles & articles the citation/abstract is provided but access to full-text retrieval is not licensed.

Open Access:  Currently over 250,000 articles on Science Direct are open access.  Articles published in open access journals are "peer-reviewed" and made free for every one to read and download.  Permitted reuse is defined by the author's choice of user license.

If you find an interesting article & the text is not offered, there are several options:

  • Check if the journal title is covered in one of JCCC's many other offered databases.  From the Library homepage, select (on left side) " Find Specific Journal ".  Open this link, enter the journal title of interest and click, search.  View other databases & their coverage limits as alternative choices for the title you've identified.  Clicking your choice redirects 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 databases deliver article text, you might request the item via Interlibrary Loan service.  It is free & turn around is timely.  Find more details in their brief policy FAQ.

 

Search Science Direct (College Edition)

Search Tips & Thoughts:

  • For psychology articles only, Science Direct is best searched using Advanced mode.
  • Think carefully about your topic & key terms you elect to search.  Science Direct offers only two boxes for keyword term(s) entry.
  • "All Fields", from the drop-down menu,  broadly includes searching article full-text as well as other citation field elements.  Recommend choosing the second option - - -Abstract, Title, & Keywords - - - for more focused results.

Example Search Topic:    Using Science Direct, I want to find what psychological research articles reveal about binge drinking among college students?

 

Click here to search Science Direct (College Edition) 

Start:

  • With Advanced Search open, spend a few seconds to familiarize yourself with its features, defaults, & option choices.
  • In the search boxes, enter the words, college students, in one box to search for both college & students in the records.  In the other box, enter the word phrase, "binge drinking", with the quotation mark to preserve occurrences of the phrase.
  • For both "All Fields" drop boxes, select the second option [ abstract, title, keywords ] for this search - - - this affords better consistency and targets where your terms should be found.
  • Leave the logic linkage un-changed to AND.
  • Under Refine your Search, deselect by clicking the default,  All.  Your choice here is to check:  Subscribed Journals, for content covered by our database subscription.
  • Most important!  You do not want to search All Sciences (basically all covered subject disciplines).  Instead, scroll down and select the subset, Psychology  for those relevant journals.
  • Check the box next to Article to ensure retrieving journal articles only and not an editorial commentary or a book review.
  • Almost Done!  If necessary or required  make adjustments concerning a needed time frame for your assignment.  Otherwise, click Search and go shopping for results.
  • This example (at the time) returned 51 article results matching the search criteria.

Aftermath - - - thinking outside of the "box": There is, in database searching, always room for improvement & new ideas/approaches to consider!  Look at your search results with a "critical "eye.  What search terms worked best in returning relevant "hits" (results)?  Were some citations off-base from what you expected to find? If so, what changes need to be made?  Did the results reveal new word terminology or concepts not otherwise considered but deemed relevant to one's topic?  What new search strategies and keyword/search fields interrelationships might be applied to better focus your initial search findings?  Does it work best for some search terms to be only in the title fields and other terms in the abstract?

Some returned examples of article titles/journals for this search are:

  • "Neural and genetic correlates of binge drinking among college women."  (2014), Biological Psychology.
  • "Gender differences in college binge drinking: examining the role of depression and school stress."  (2013), The Social Science Journal.
  • "Binge drinking in the context of romantic relationships."  (2005),  Addictive Behaviors.