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Counseling
Guide to resources and research strategies for professors and students focusing on counseling studies
Education Librarian
Key Databases for Counseling Research
- PsycINFO (EBSCO) This link opens in a new windowCovers professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines. Contains over two million citations and summaries of articles from journals, books, book chapters, dissertations, and technical reports. Some full-text.
- Family Studies Abstracts (EBSCO) This link opens in a new windowIncludes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to family studies, including marriage, divorce, family therapy, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline. The index contains more than 53,500 records, which are carefully selected from the most important sources within the discipline.
- Chicano Database (EBSCO) This link opens in a new windowProvides bibliographic citations to materials focused on the Mexican-American and Chicano experience, as well as the broader Latino experience of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and Central American immigrants from 1992 onwards. Selectively indexes content from journals, newspapers, books, book chapters and more. Subjects covered include art, bilingual education, education, health, labor, language, literature, mental health, and politics.
- Counseling and Therapy in Video (Alexander Street) This link opens in a new windowAccess to over 1500 online videos for the study of social work, psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatric counseling. Includes counseling sessions and demonstrations; expert consultations; lectures, presentations, and interviews of well-known therapists; and teaching & discussion guides.
- PTSDpubs (formerly PILOTS) This link opens in a new windowCovers the Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress. Includes citations to literature on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health sequelae of traumatic events, without disciplinary, linguistic, or geographical limitations. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Also freely available through U.S. Veterans Affairs. - Education Full-text (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window(Also known as Education Abstracts) Selectively indexes and abstracts articles from more than 400 English-language periodicals. Books relating to education published from 1995 to the present are also indexed. Indexing coverage begins with June 1983, abstracting begins with January 1994, and full-text coverage from more than 150 of the periodicals begins with January 1996.
- Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection (EBSCO) This link opens in a new windowProvides full text/full image coverage for 575 scholarly journals, most of which are peer-reviewed. Topics covered include emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry and psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational and experimental methods.
- Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest) This link opens in a new windowFocuses on sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences, indexing and abstracting thousands of titles including journals, conference papers, books, and dissertations.
- Psychology Database (ProQuest) This link opens in a new windowProvides access to more than 400 full-text, full-image journals in psychology.
- MEDLINE (EBSCO) This link opens in a new windowProvides article citations from over 4,800 journals published in the United States and seventy other countries. Encompasses information from Index Medicus, Index to Dental Literature, and International Nursing, as well as other sources in allied health, biological and physical sciences, humanities, and information science as they relate to medicine and health care, communication disorders, population biology, and reproductive biology. Produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
- Sage Research Methods Online This link opens in a new windowContains content on research methods from books, journals and reference sources; research methods videos; tutorials; case studies showing how research methods are applied; and practice datasets from actual research. Researchers can explore methods concepts to help them design research projects, understand particular methods or identify a new method, conduct their research, and write up their findings. Since SRMO focuses on methodology rather than disciplines, it can be used across the social sciences, health sciences, and more. Includes entire "Little Green Book" (quantitative research) and "Little Blue Book" (qualitative research) series.
Research tips
Research papers are those you will write for classes that review and discuss existing scholarship, scholarly literature, and academic articles.
What makes up an academic article?
They are formal research reports written by researchers. Academic articles follow an established format that consists of:
- Addressing a problem
- Writing a problem statement
- A review of the relevant existing research
- A statement of methodology, including the characteristics of the population to be studied. It also includes the method of data collection and analysis of the data.
- The results
- Discussion of the results
- Addressing the Limitation of the Study
- (optional) Including Future Work
References support all scholarly work and published research.
These articles are published in research publications only after blind peer-review. A blind peer-review means that other researchers in the same field assess the article submitted for review.
- The reviewers do not know who wrote the article, and the author(s) of the article do not know who reviewed it, thus a "blind" review.
- The reviewers evaluate the article for the quality of the research and its value as a contribution to the field,
- They can recommend publication, suggest it not be published, or suggest revisions.
Finding academic articles
- The best way of finding relevant articles for your papers is by searching relevant databases or Google Scholar.
- You must identify the keywords for your search. As you do your searching, you might find better or more accurate keywords in article titles or abstracts. Thus modifying your search is part of the process.
- When you find relevant articles, read the reference list or bibliography. Since the authors are required to review the relevant research, they have already gathered previous articles on the same and related subjects.
- You can access the full-text of the article by clicking on the link that says Full Text or PDF. You can then print the article, email it to yourself, or save it to your computer or flash drive.
- You can download or email the citation to yourself. Be sure to edit the citation to fit APA style for your reference list.
- If you are using bibliographic management software, you can export the citation directly to that program.