APP1016 Foundations of Psychological Research: Databases & journals

Journals and Databases Explained

You can search for journal articles on a topic via Library search or via Library databases.  A Database is a search engine for journal articles. Key databases for searching psychology literature are listed on this page

The video below provides an introduction to scholarly and academic journals and explains the peer-review process.

Scholarly or Academic Journal and Databases from Victoria University Library on Vimeo.

Databases

  • APA-FT contains the full text of the top 200 Australian journals indexed in APAIS, the Australian Public Affairs Information Service. Includes the Australian Psychologist and the Australian Journal of Psychology.
  • Academic Search Elite provides full text for over 4500 journals across all academic disciplines, useful for all social science topics.  Includes the American Journal of Evaluation, Counselling Psychology Quarterly and Journal of Psychology.
  • Humanities and Social Sciences Collection provides access to a range of Australian journals, books, reports, conference proceedings, research papers and reference materials. Covers psychology, counselling, childcare, unemployment, family law, health, housing, and domestic violence.
  • JSTOR-Arts and Sciences Collections provides full-text back files of scholarly journals in the social sciences, including psychology. Because of JSTOR's archival mission, there is a gap, typically from 1 to 5 years, between the most recently published journal issue and the content available in JSTOR. 
  • ProQuest One Academic includes peer reviewed journals, ebooks, conference papers, dissertations and theses, reference materials case studies, and videos.                            
  • Health and Society in Video - explores medical progress in health and wellness issues and their impact on society, with hundreds of premium documentaries, profiles, reports, and interviews.
  • Psychological Experiments Online - is a multimedia collection that synthesizes the most important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, fostering deeper levels of understanding for students and scholars alike.
  • ​Psychiatry Legacy Collection - covers the field of psychiatry from 1844 through six respected, peer-reviewed psychiatry journals.
  • Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works  - a searchable collection containing real transcripts of therapy and counselling sessions and first-person narratives illuminating the experience of mental illness and its treatment, as well as reference work to contextualize the primary material.
  • Alexander Street Counseling - over 1000 hours of online videos available for the study of social work, psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatric counselling. Now includes the Video Journal of Counseling and Therapy.
  • Psychology Database (ProQuest) covers topics in clinical and social psychology, genetics, psychology of business and economics, communication, criminology, addiction, neurology, social welfare, and more.
  • PSYCINFO - contains citations and abstracts of articles from nearly 2000 psychology journals, plus book chapters, books, technical reports, as well as citations to dissertations.
  • MEDLINE– contains citations and abstracts of articles from over 4,600 current biomedical journals. 
  • Health Collection- is a new full text online database which delivers cover-to-cover access to core content from the Australasia region. Content includes research articles, reports and case studies of practical support to anyone studying or working in therapeutic, diagnostic and preventative health roles.
  • CINAHL– is a bibliographic database containing full text from nursing and allied health journals.
  • Families & Society Collection- covers family, marriage, women; culture and institutions, private, civil and family law; social services and public welfare in Australia.
  • SCOPUS– a citation tracking database of over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals and web sources.
  • Web od Science- indexes over 10,000 peer reviewed journals in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, as well as international proceedings coverage for over 120,000 conferences.
  • SAGE Research Methods- is a research methodology tool that contains over 600 books, dictionaries, encyclopedias and handbooks, including the entire "Little Green Book" and "Little Blue Book." SRMO also includes the ‘Methods Map’ feature to help you explore different methodologies. 

How to find peer reviewed journal articles through 'Library Search'

How to Search for Journal Articles in PsycInfo

Academic Search Elite- video tutorial

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a search engine that provides links to full-text articles to which the University Library subscribes and to resources made freely available by the publisher.

Full text journal articles can be retrieved by clicking on the "Find Fulltext@VU Library" link when it appears to the right of your search results. This will happen automatically while on-campus but may need to be set up as "Library Links" under Scholar Settings to work from off-site.

Try entering your own search terms in the Google Scholar box below.

Google Scholar Search