Your Librarian
ZSR Resources for Graduate Students
The links below provide information about resources and services available to graduate students through ZSR Library.
- Interlibrary LoanUse this FREE service to request books, articles, and other materials not held at ZSR from other libraries. Items that have to be sent through the mail can take a week or two to arrive, so plan ahead!
What's a Literature Review?
If you've never done a literature review before, you're not alone. As an assignment, literature reviews are a unique and challenging way to learn how to search for and make sense of the current research on a topic and to build your skills in communicating using the language of your discipline. Literature reviews serve an extremely important purpose for scholars in any field: they synthesize the research, identify gaps, disagreements, and inconsistencies, and expose scholars to papers they hadn't yet encountered.
The librarians at Williams College have put together a wonderful and comprehensive self-guided tutorial:
Literature Review: A Self-Guided Tutorial from Williams CollegeConducting Structured Literature Reviews
As you begin your research, we recommend reviewing these resources for conducting a structured literature review. Even if you are not performing a full systematic review, drafting a detailed plan of your study before you begin any type of literature review ensures reproducibility and transparency and reduces bias.
Scholarly Journals
To find articles in scholarly journals, start by going to the Find a Database page and use "Find by Subject." Your best bets for Counseling include PsycINFO and ERIC.
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new windowThe premiere Psychology journal database. Provides comprehensive coverage for the field of psychology. Contains abstracts from articles, books, book chapters, journals, dissertations, and other sources. PsycINFO Quick Reference Guide
- ERIC (via EBSCO) This link opens in a new windowERIC searches an enormous collections of journals, book chapters and other research in education and related fields.
- PubMed This link opens in a new windowPubMed provides access to MEDLINE, a database of citations covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences.
- ProQuest Psychology Database This link opens in a new windowCovers a wide range of topics, including behavioral, clinical, cognitive, developmental, experimental, industrial, and social psychology, along with personality, psychobiology and psychometrics. Includes journals and magazines, as well as dissertations, grey literature, and more.
- Social Sciences Citation Index (Web of Science) This link opens in a new windowindexes over 1,700 journals in the social sciences including anthropology, communications, history, law, management, political science, psychology, sociology, and women's studies. It provides bibliographic data, author abstracts, and cited references. Social Sciences Citation Index is most useful for searching for articles that cite a known author or work. Citation searching also allows a researcher to use a given work as a subject term in order to identify more recent articles about the same topic.
- PTSDpubs This link opens in a new windowSponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, this database includes citations to literature on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health issues related to traumatic events, without disciplinary, linguistic, or geographical limitations.
Finding Tests & Measures
Tips & Tricks for Finding Tests & Measures:
- FAQ: Finding Information About Psychological TestsThis website created by the American Psychology Association describes how to find published and unpublished tests.
- Searching PsycINFO's Tests & Measures Field via EBSCOhost [Video]This video will show you how to use the Test & Measures field of the PsycINFO database on the EBSCOhost platform.
Resources for Finding Tests & Measures:
- SAGE Research Methods This link opens in a new windowIncludes a tool called "Which Stats Test" to help you choose an appropriate statistical test for your research, along with many other resources to support qualitative and quantitative research.
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new windowProvides abstracts to journal articles, book chapters, books and dissertations in psychology and related disciplines (sociology, linguistics, anthropology, education, medicine, law, physiology, business, psychiatry, nursing, pharmacology). Links to full text in PsycARTICLES and to other resources in ZSR. Coverage: 1806-
- Mental Measurements Yearbook This link opens in a new windowProvides a comprehensive guide to contemporary testing instruments. The series contains information for evaluating test products in psychology, education, business and leadership. Coverage: 9th edition through present
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new windowFull-text and abstracts of dissertations and theses from 1861 to the present from the US, UK, and Ireland. Full-text coverage is mainly 1997-present but many older ones are also full-text. Coverage: 1861-
Tests in Print XCall Number: Reference Collection, Wilson 4ISBN: 9780910674690Publication Date: 2022-07-15Designed to complement the Mental Measurements Yearbooks, Tests in Print fills a pressing need for a comprehensive bibliography of commercially available English language tests. Although these volumes are useful in and of themselves, their maximum usefulness requires the availability and use of the Mental Measurements Yearbooks. Information on available tests and specific test bibliographies are valuable, but the greatest service Tests in Print can perform is to encourage test users to choose tests more wisely by consulting Mental Measurements Yearbooks test reviews; test reviews from journals; and professional literature on the construction, use, and psychometric properties of tests under consideration. Tests in Print X contains descriptive information on approximately 2,300 testing instruments. Detailed descriptions of each test include data on test purpose, target population, scores, administration time, publication date(s), author(s), and pricing. Indexes of test titles, publishers, acronyms, and subject classifications are provided as well as notations on hundreds of out-of-print tests. Tests in Print X provides specific information about testing required by professionals in diverse areas such as education, psychology, counseling, management, career planning, child development, and research. It also serves as a comprehensive index to the Mental Measurements Yearbook series by directing readers to the appropriate volume for reviews of specific tests.
- Tests and Measures in the Social SciencesThe "Tests and Measures in the Social Sciences" (TMSS) is an index to tests and measurement tools used in psychology, sociology, health, marketing, management, and so on, that may be found in one or more reference resources.
- Communication and Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new windowContains scholarly literature on all aspects of communication studies, including discourse, linguistics, media studies, and rhetoric. Coverage: 1915-
Finding Grey Literature
Grey literature is literature that does not go through the traditional scholarly publishing process, but is produced by governments, academia, NGOs and IGOs, think tanks, and other groups where publishing is not the primary purpose of the organization. Examples of grey literature include: dissertations, theses, working papers, government reports, policy documents, conference presentations and abstracts, pre-prints, and more. Unlike scholarship produced through traditional venues, grey literature tends to be widely dispersed and may require a different search strategy. For help locating grey literature, contact your librarian!
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global This link opens in a new windowFull-text and abstracts of dissertations and theses from 1861 to the present from the US, UK, and Ireland. Full-text coverage is mainly 1997-present but many older ones are also full-text. Coverage: 1861-
- SocArXivSocArXiv, open archive of the social sciences, provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code.
Zotero
Do you know Zotero? This powerful citation manager helps you keep up with everything you find during the research process, then it helps you cite your sources in-text as you write your paper and generates a bibliography at the end. Interested in learning more? Check out our Zotero guide to work through a self-guided tutorial, watch our Zotero tutorials on YouTube, or make a virtual appointment to get more help!
