Graziano & Raulin
Research Methods (9th edition)
Library Resources
Research ideas and findings can be found in books, journals, technical reports, and a variety of other media. A small college library often will have 250,000 or more books and journals. A major university library may have 5,000,000 or more books, often housed in a dozen or more specialized libraries, and will subscribe to more than 10,000 journals, each journal publishing a hundred or more individual articles per year. In addition, almost any university library in the country will have electronic and mail access to the collections of virtually all other libraries through interlibrary loan.
When you enter the modern university library you are in touch with nearly all of the information that has ever been published. Fortunately, you will need only a small fraction of that information for your own research. How to find what you need is the focus of this tutorial.
In this tutorial, we will cover the most critical resources for psychology students, including books, journals, and organizational elements. One often thinks of books in terms of novels, since novels dominate many bookstores. But most books published are non-fiction, and university libraries specialize in such books. Journals provide specific types of information about ideas, theories, research, and criticism of current theories. Journals are the life blood of science and scholarship--making the details of the work and ideas of researchers available to scholars around the world.
But the books and journals would be of little value if one could not find just the information one needs. Libraries have organized their collections for thousands of years, but those organizational systems have become more critical as the amount of information has expanded. We will assume that you already have the skills to learn material that you have found in the library. We will be focusing on helping you to be more efficient in finding that material. The good news is that with modern library technology, one can find detailed information on virtually any topic in a matter of minutes, whereas just a few years ago the same process might have taken days or even weeks.
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