Overview

Psychology - Academic Referencing and Writing

Psychology Research

This LibGuide will give you advice on how to write academically, as well as understand how to find good sources for your investigations.

Open Access Academic Databases

ResearchGate

Access millions of publications and connect with 15+ million researchers for free! Discover scientific knowledge, and make your research visible.

Academia

Join over 10.5 million Academics and Researchers to access millions of scholarly articles for free! Academia is the easiest way to share papers with millions of people across the world for free.

DOAJ

DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. By 2018, it has 8,999 searchable articles from 12,065 Journals

CORE

CORE offers seamless access to millions of open access research papers, enriches the collected data for text-mining and provides unique services to the research community.

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

Open access, free academic articles. Includes science, philosophy, history, and literature.

High Wire (Stanford University)

HighWire’s Intelligent Publishing Platform supports over 3000 journals, books, reference works, and proceedings.

ScienceOpen

ScienceOpen is a freely accessible search and discovery platform that covers over 46 million Open Access articles and article records.

Digital Commons Network

The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. It is curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions.

Journal versus Website

When you conduct research for a Psychology assessment, you may come across a number of great articles that give useful information about your topic. Two sources that you will often find journal articles and articles found on websites. Both can be useful for your research, but both serve different functions. Moreover, they are both very different when it comes to referencing.

To explore the differences there are some activities and information on the tabs on this LibGuide (seen above) which give examples of each. To summarise briefly, a journal article will generally contain original research, be peer-reviewed (which means that other researchers have read and check the article to ensure it meets a certain academic rigour) and will be constructed in a way that clearly outlines that way the research has been conducted, its findings and possible applications of further research. An article found on a website will generally summarise other research, will not be checked by anyone outside the organisation publishing it (meaning that you need to decide on it veracity) and does not always follow a clear structure. This does not mean that an article from a website should not be used, rather you need to be aware of its purpose and limitations as it applies to your work.

If you are looking for an article on a website then using google or other web search engine is fine. If you are looking for academic articles then google scholar or any of the open-access databases found on the left of this page will help you. You may also choose to use the GALE Databases available through the Nexus webpage.