Psychology Resources: Other Databases

Greek letter "Psi" - Symbol for Psychology

Public Domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons

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Gumberg Library News Databases

There are general/multidisciplinary databases that can be useful in searching the literature of psychology.

Click the links below to search them.  If you want to use the database off campus, you will need to first enter you Multipass username and password.

The most widely-used database at Duquesne University, Google Scholar can be a helpful research tool, if you know its limitations. Below are some importants facts about Google Scholar:

• Contrary to popular belief, it does not index everything - It does not provide "one-stop shopping."
• It is very good for searching cross-disciplinary topics
• It indexes only scholarly materials, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, journal articles
• Materials indexed are from academic publishers, professional societies. preprint repositories, universities. However not all publishers or database vendors take part.
• You can set priorities so that it shows which articles are full text in Gumberg Library databases. Click the link in the box on the right to see how to set Google Scholar priorities.

In the box below you will find some tips for searching Google Scholar.

Click the link directly below to start searching Google Scholar.

• Choose good search terms (specific, concrete, descriptive)
• The Boolean operator AND is assumed - No need to put AND between your search terms to require all terms appear in you search result
• To use the OR operator, put it in capital letters (dogs OR cats)
• Searches all variants of a word (So if you enter "attack." Google Scholar also finds "attacks," "attacked," "attacking")
• To exclude a word put a minus sign (-) in front of it (-king brings finds Martin Luther, but not Martin Luther King, Jr.)
• Place a ~ in front of a word to find synonyms (~protests will retrieve "demonstrations," "riots," etc. as well)
• To search exact phrases, place your phrase in double quotation marks ("employee burnout")

Many of the Gumberg Library databases supply not only bibliographic citations for articles, but full text as well. To learn about how to know in if full text is available in any our our resources, click the link below for a page that describes this in detail.

Click the link below to learn how to make Google Scholar tell you if an article found in a search result is available full text in a Gumberg Library database.