Hi my name is Sarah Dockray, a librarian at Valencia College. Today I'm going to show you how to find journal articles for Psychology research. The first step in the process is, of course, to find an article to research. There are two ways to accomplish this. First, you can look through the text of your textbook and look for citations throughout. These are usually at the end of the sentence within the paragraphs in parentheses and will contain an author name and year of publication. Once you find the citation on a topic that seems interesting to you, you can flip to the references section in the back if you text book that looks like this, and look for the author's last name in the list to find the article citation. The other way you can find an article to research is by going straight to the references section and flipping through until you find one that piques your interest. Beware, because some of the references listed are books or web sites as opposed to journal articles. One important part of the process is knowing the proper APA citation style for journal articles, so you can then find the textbook article in the library. You will need to know the date of publication, the title of the article, and the title of the journal or periodical in order to find the article within the library. Our next step now is to go into the Osceola Campus Library resources and find the article we need. To access the library's online resources, you're going to log into your Atlas account. You can do so by visiting any Valencia College home page and looking for the Atlas logo in the right corner, or you can go to atlas.valenciacollege.edu to log in. Once you're logged in to your Atlas account, you're going to look for the "Libraries" box in the upper right hand corner and click the link that says "Search the Library". Now normally if you were looking for any journal article on a topic you would use "Databases A-Z" or "Databases by Subject". However since we already have the citation for the exact article we need we're going to click "Journals A-Z".

Once you click "Journals A-Z". you're going to click "Citation Linker" and now will enter into information about the article that we found. Again this is where knowing APA citation style come in handy because as you can see, the journal title, article title, and year of publication are required in order to find the right one that you need. So I've picked an article out of the back of the book in the References section, and now I'll enter in the information for it. Starting the title, now moving on to the journal title, and finally the publication date. Once I have that information in, I can press the "Go" button. You should get a pop-up window which will list all the different journals that somehow matched the journal title you entered. Scroll until you find the exact match and click on the title which should be a link. If the library has the journal article you're looking for, it will open in a new window. Know that the library does not own every single journal article that is in the back of the textbook, so you may have to do a little bit of hunting in order to find an article that works for you. My article was found, so now I can read a little bit about the journal article in the abstract, which is just the summary of the article. Once I'm ready to actually read the full text of the article, which is what you need to do for this assignment, you can click on the full text link at the bottom of the abstract. This opens up a .PDF scan of the article, which you would need to read to complete your assignment. Keep in mind that you need to find an original research study, not just any article out of the back of the book. There are a few things that you can look for in order to determine if your article is an original research study. Sometimes articles will be split up into different categories. It will have a methods and materials section, it may have a conclusion or results section, and in the abstract you can even get a bit of a hint because sometimes it will discuss participants, study groups, a sample, the methodology, or the variables that were used within the article.

Again, scan through the article. You have options to print the article or save the article. Now it's just up to you to read the article, make sure it fits the assignment, and complete the assignment. If you have any questions about the research process please feel free to stop by the Osceola Campus Library or contact a librarian for help.