The Baylor librarians often point undergraduate students to the Academic Search Complete database when they are first starting a research project. It’s no secret why we do – it’s a great multidisciplinary database, which indexes journals from all sorts of subjects from the sciences, social sciences and humanities. No matter your topic, you’ll most likely find some great research materials through there.

But I’ve got a tip about a great database to use for a lot of topics, even though it’s not normally considered a multidisciplinary database: PsycINFO. That’s right, the gold standard of psychology databases, produced by the American Psychology Association, even. I consider PsycINFO to be a secret multidisciplinary resource, and I suggest it when I hear students describe their research projects in certain ways.

Head Trip “Effect on…”

“What kind of effect does video gaming have…?”
“How does all this standardized testing effect students…?”
“Does screen time effect children…?”
“Can social media have an effect on people’s beliefs about…?”
“What effect do laws about marijuana have on people’s use…?”

Whenever a student wants to know how something effects a someone, that is related to how a person thinks, or believes, or reacts and that, my friends, is the kind of research you can find in PsycINFO; even if the topic may seem on the surface in the domain of education, or law, or technology, or business, or….. you get the picture.

So try it next time you find yourself describing the project you are working on as something having an effect on someone. You might be surprised with the research that you can find in PsycINFO.