Getting Ideas for a Study

Specialized Conferences:

As you become more advanced, you might want to attend a conference that is specialized in a specific area. In fact, many psychologists just go to these rather than the general ones. Some are as large or even larger than the general conferences.

Some suggestions are:

• Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy:
  http://www.aabt.org
• Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology:
  http:// www.faseb.org/arvo/
• Psychonomic Society:
  http://www.psychonomic.com
• Society for Neuroscience:
  http://www.sfn.org/
• Society for Research in Child Development:
  http://www.srcd.org.
• Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues:
  http://www.spssi.org/

In the past, if you needed sources for a paper or for ideas, a professor would tell you to go look up your topic in Psychological Abstracts. Your library might still have the older bound volumes around. Psych Abstracts (as it was called) was a monthly periodical that reproduced the abstracts (short summaries) from journal articles. At the end of the year - a topical index was published that gave a number for each abstract. It was hellish to use.

Today there are options that are more modern.

You are lucky today as the American Psychological Association produces a Web searchable database called Psych Info. It is searchable by author and keyword combination. It is a joy to use compared to the old Psychological Abstracts. Most University libraries provide access to it and usually give classes in its use.

With over one million records, PsycINFO indexes the academic, research, & practice literature in psychology from over 45 countries in more than 30 languages. Includes relevant materials from related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, education, social work, law, criminology, social science & organizational behavior. Covers 1967-present & is updated monthly.

The way Psych Info works is for you to enter a topic and it will return the number of articles on that topic and then enable to you read the abstracts. In the following graphic, I entered "Weapon focus.

Note that Psych Info is going to search from 1984 on and look for the words anywhere. You can also search for specific authors - quite a useful feature.

Here is the result I received after telling the program to search for me. Note that there are nine results that match the term. If I click on the term, then the nine abstracts will appear on my screen.

Let's say you find an author that peaks your interest. It makes sense that articles that cite this author may be of interest to you. Luckily, a firm called The Institute for Scientific Information ® (http://www.isinet.com/) produces the Social Sciences Citation Index. It is a print or searchable database that enables you enter an author's name and then come up with article that reference your target author's work. These have a high probability of being useful.

Bottom Line: