Psychology: Get Started

Reference sources include encyclopedias, handbooks, and dictionaries.  They are a great place to begin your research, since they can help with the following:

• Offer ideas for possible research topics
• Give you background information on your topic
• Define unfamiliar terms
• Suggest keywords to use when searching for books and articles
• Point you to books and articles on your topic, via "works cited" lists

View the drop-down tab for "Reference Sources" to browse reference books for Psychology

Contact the Reference Desk

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Use these tips to help you choose a research topic:

• To brainstorm ideas to research, try browsing:
  • News in your subject area. (Google sociology news to find websites to browse.)
  • The table of contents of a book or encyclopedia in your subject area.
• Do some initial searching on one or more topic ideas, using our main library search box or Google.
• Refine your topic based on what you find:
  • Maybe you found a slight variation or different direction you want to go in.
  • Tons of results? Consider narrowing your topic to focus on a smaller aspect of it.
  • Hardly any results? You may need to broaden your topic and make it less specific.
• In the end, choose something you're interested in.

If you want to discuss topic ideas, stop by the Reference Desk to chat with a librarian.

These search tips work in our library databases and Library Catalog:

• Combine keywords using AND and OR.
  • Use AND for searching different ideas within your topic. E.g. youth AND homelessness
  • Use OR for searching with synonyms of your keywords. E.g. (youth OR teen) AND homelessness
• Abbreviate words with multiple endings using an asterisk (*). E.g. homeless* to search both homeless and homelessness
• Search specific phrases using quotation marks. E.g. "Runaway and Homeless Youth Act"
• Change your search terms around to get different results.

When writing your literature review or paper, make sure that your are not simple summarizing each article or source individually. Keep track of different themes you find across all your sources. Each theme will later become a section of your literature review or paper.