Psychology and Education @St. Thomas

Peer Review? What’s the deal?

merriealynn — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:38:03 +0000

Many faculty members want their students to use only peer reviewed/refereed journal articles. (Journals send the articles out to folks doing research in the same field as the author(s) and get reviews back on the quality and importance of the article.)

Here are some issues that you should be thinking about when reading these articles: You still must critically read ANY article you see.

September 29, 2010
Research Without Borders
Scholarly Communication Program
Columbia University

Tutorial: Setting up Word for APA style papers

merriealynn — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:56:10 +0000

I’m delighted to share a tutorial with you. Step-by-step instructions to format a paper in Word. The embedded video here discusses Word 2007/2010 for Windows. From Terrence Jorgensen, Kennesaw State University, Psychology Lab
http://psychology.hss.kennesaw.edu/resources/psychlab/

Prof. Jorgensen has another video for Word for MAC. If you go to his website, scroll down. On the right-hand side of the page to “Using APA Style in MS Word”. These videos allow you use a table of contents to jump through the video. Thank you, Prof. Jorgensen!

Headings in Word — especially for your doctoral project

merriealynn — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:23:51 +0000

Researching and writing your doctoral project entails tons of work and thought. And then you have to format the thing. Why should that send you over the edge?

The headings never seem to do what you want!

I’ve finally learned how to set up headings in Word. Thank goodness people all over the web are so helpful!

Here are two handouts that explain the process, step by step:

http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/numbering20072010.html

http://cybertext.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/word-2007_-taming-multilevel-list-numbering.pdf

Extra bonus: When you use Headings in Word, you can make Word automatically produce a Table of contents.

If you’d like, come visit me and we can work on your Headings together.

Want a New Journal in Psychology?

merriealynn — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 16:09:53 +0000

Frustrated finding articles on your topic? Think, if only we had the Journal of Positive Psychology, my time here would be paradise! Or I could finish my paper in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Why don’t we have the J of Positive Psych? When we started the psych program here, the libraries decided to limit our journals in the field. Students don’t come here to study with individual faculty, so every year students write on different, cherished topics. Getting journals in all of the different fields would require tons of money.

Instead, the library felt students could get anything they need through InterLibrary Loan. This is true. And our InterLibrary Loan department is amazing! They can find just about anything and get it quickly.

However, when students research their topic, not finding the full text for article after article leads to frustration. We understand.

Yet, I don’t want to subscribe to journals haphazardly. We set up new subscriptions to journals in the spring. My plan is to encourage everyone to ILL everything they need this year. I can get statistics on what you’ve requested and decide which journals folks need the most. Also, if you find that you need several article from a certain journal, please let me me know the title.

Please let all of your colleagues know that I’m working on the serials situation this year. Write in with your favorite journals!

Annual Reviews: Psychology and Clinical Psychology

merriealynn — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:57:20 +0000

Annual Reviews provides in-depth, analytical overviews of topics being discussed in the field right now. These are basically reports of the most important scholarly communication available on the topic.

What can Annual Reviews do for you?

Find new topics.
Get great references.
See what the field is interested in.
See where gaps are in the research.

If you find a relatively recent article on your topic, you’ll find tons of seminal articles on your topic — articles that everyone who publishes on your topic read.

One problem: their search screen. Going to their website, you wonder how to find anything if you don’t want to browse 80 years of research.

Well, here are the guidelines…

First, click on the search button, without typing in any words or anything:

Next, click on the Journals button:

Click on Journals under search boxes

Type in your specific topic/search terms and choose the academic subject fields you’re interested in.

Finally, you can search!

And you’re results which, in this case, are excellent and interesting.

Primo! man!

It’s hard to get downtown. Skype me!

merriealynn — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:18:03 +0000

Can’t or don’t want to come downtown to Minneapolis? Need to chat about your paper or doc project? The phone is frustrating?

Let’s Skype!

Why do I love Skype?

It’s free!
We can see each other!
We can see each others’ computer screens!
I get to hear your voice!
Less time-consuming and frustrating than the phone or IM.

My Skype name is merrie.davidson.

Download Skype at http://www.skype.com/intl/en/get-skype/

We can chat and share our computer screens without a web camera. So, if you’d rather I not see you in your pajamas, we can still use Skype. (But flannel pajamas are my clothing of choice.)

If you’d like to play on Skype before using it for real, we can do that too!

PsycTESTS and PsycTHERAPY: Should UST subscribe?

merriealynn — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:49:46 +0000

Do you need a test of anxiety? An intelligence inventory for Spanish-speaking children? A questionnaire to determine the degree of economic hardship families face?

Do you want to know if the test, inventory or questionnaire is valid or reliable? Then PsycTESTS is for you!

APA, the folks who bring you PsycINFO, has collected the tests, measurements, inventories, and questionnaires that have been developed, reviewed, and used in almost all of the articles that they index. Yes, you can get them in full text, linked to the articles they appear in!

It’s a cornucopia of testing delight.

Try out PsycTESTS!

A librarian can fit in anywhere

Afterwards, take our poll to let me know how much you liked it.

At same place, look at PsycTHERAPY. Would these videos help you with your work?

Annotated Bibliograpy in RefWorks

merriealynn — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 22:10:03 +0000

RefWorks can do amazing things for you!

Often students need to write annotated bibliographies. If you use RefWorks, you can have it make a bibliography for you and then type your annotation under each of the citations. Nice, but sometimes a headache for formatting.

You could, however, have RefWorks format the entire annotated bibliography for you! There are 3 steps:

1) Export all of your articles, books, and other references into RefWorks.

2) In each record in RefWorks, type in your annotation (description, analysis, critique) of the article in the Personal Notes field. (To edit a record, click on the edit icon –a piece of paper with pencil).

3) Click on the Create Bibliography button. For Output Style, under University of St Thomas Specific, select APA-6th: Annotated Bibliography. Follow the regular process to make a bibliography and Voila! A formatted annotated bibliography.

Choose APA 6th -- Annotated Bibliography

Voila!

The Annotated Bibliography!

Let me know if you’d like different formats (you can do this yourself by clicking on Bibliography and then Edit Output Style.) But I’m happy to reformat the style to make it more useable for everyone. Let me know!

GET IT button working in PsycINFO!

merriealynn — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 18:27:24 +0000

Yay! You can find full-text in PsycINFO by just clicking on the GET IT! button.

Let me know if you have any problems. We’ll fix whatever we can.

UCLA’s Academic Technology Services (Statistics) Page

merriealynn — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:38:45 +0000

UCLA’s Academic Technology Services (Statistics) aids students and faculty at UCLA using statistics for research and presentation of research. Lucky for us, their websiteprovides a lot of assistance in determining which statistics to use, how to use statistics and annotated code for SAS and SPSS. They have a large amount of annotated code and output for various programs. Results seem well-indexed by Google, so searching “technique software ATS UCLA” usually gets a solution, e.g. regression SPSS ATS UCLA. Hope this helps when you’re stuck with SPSS!

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/