Psychology Resources: Annual Reviews

Greek letter "Psi" - Symbol for Psychology

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Click the link below to learn what research articles are and how to spot them.

Research Articles

When we speak about searching the literature in psychology on a particular topic, there are two types of articles to consider. The first is the research article. In these, groups of researchers describe research projects they carried out. They are usually published in scholarly journals. The focus of these articles is necessarily very narrow. To gain a picture of the state of knowledge on a particular topic through research articles would mean reading possibly hundreds of articles, something busy professionals do not have time to do.

Click the link in the box on the lower right to view a document that will show you how to recognize research articles.

Review Articles

This brings us to the second sort of article dealing with research, the review article. In a review article, a scholar or group of scholars gathers all the research articles on a particular topic, and after reading them, writes an article reviewing and evaluating them. Finding a review article or two on a psychological topic permits a researcher new to a topic to quickly gain a picture of the state of knowledge regarding that topic.

In most databases of scholarly literarture it is possible to limit your searches to research and/or review articles.

While review articles are available through any database of professional literature, the Annual Reviews database is devoted exclusively to providing access to review articles in a large number of academic disciplines, two of which are psychology and clinical psychology.

Here are important facts about Annual Review of Psychology (ARP) and Annual Review of Clinical Psychology (ARCP):

• They do not review all of their respective disciplines every year
• All subdisciplines of psychology and clinical psychology are reviewed within a decade
• ARP goes back to the 1930s; ARCP goes back to 2005
• Articles from these have extensive bibliographies
• All articles from the Annual Reviews database are full text

The Annual Reviews database is NOT included in the list of psychology databases. To get to the Annual Reviews database, go to the Gumberg Library homepage http://www.duq.edu/library

Once at the homepage, go to the left hand column headed "Research" and click on "Articles/Research Databases."

On the next screen, go to the middle column headed "Databases A to Z" and click on "A."

Then, click on "Annual Reviews."

Or to access the Annual Reviews database from this page, click on the link below. If you want to use the database off campus, you will need to first enter you Multipass username and password.

At the Annual Reviews page, enter your search and then click the button in front of “in selected journals”

and then from the pull down menu choose Psychology or Clinical Psychology. (If you hold down the Shift key, you can choose to search both at once).

Then click the Search button to run your search.