This guide was created to support your work on Assignment 1: a More Ethical Little Albert. Below are some guides to finding relevant research as well as citing your resources. Please visit your PSYC 223 course page for assignment instructions and additional suggested resources.
The resources below are broken down into three core ideas:
Your assignment requires you to define key terms, discuss the ethical concerns and impacts of a human-focused psychological research, and reflect upon how your research may inform your future practice. Therefore, you need to develop a search strategy that allows you to find relevant and reliable resources that will support your ideas.
Below are several core research skills that will inform your search strategy:
1. What are the key ideas of my research topic? Take a moment to brainstorm what you already know about the topic, Take time to think about what types of resources you will need to answer all of the questions related to your topic.
2. Skim background research: This could include your course lecture notes, your textbook, and internet searches related to your topic. During this stage, start noting any key words that you could add to your database and library catalogue searches.
3. Use relevant and reliable research tools to find resources: Consider the types of resources you need and then select tools that will help you find the resources. Below are some examples:
| Type of Resource | Recommended Tool(s) |
|---|---|
| Government and Health Information resources: Research Ethics board (Health Canada), Tri-Council policy documents, Children's/Pediatric hospitals, clinical psychology resources. | Internet search (e.g. Google Chrome, Safari, Mozilla) *confirm if the information source is reliable - see How to Identify Reliable Information |
| Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed Articles: articles published in scholarly journals | Discipline-focused databases such as Psycinfo, Socindex, and Web of Science; Google Scholar |
| Books, eBooks, videos, and more: scholarly books can provide background information related to your topic. | MacEwan Library Catalogue Search |
Psycinfo is a psychology-focused database that includes journal articles, book chapters, technical reports, and dissertations all from the field of psychology and psychological aspects of related disciplines. For most topics in psychology, PsycInfo is a good starting point for your research.
There are two ways to access Psycinfo:
The following video demonstrates how to enter topic keywords, use limiters to narrow your search results, and access full-text articles:
Correctly citing sources in an academic paper involves two elements: In-text citations and a references list. Below are some suggested resources to support your writing and citing work:
Citation Starter tools can speed up your citation work by creating a machine-generated "rough draft" of a citation. Many of the search tools you're already using (e.g. Psycinfo, Google Scholar, the Library Catalogue) have built-in citation starter tools. To use the tools, simply select your citation style and copy and paste the citation into your reference list. Once you have collected all of your reference list citations, you can then proofread and correct them using the APA 7th edition guide. Below is a slideshow that highlights the citation starter tool for the Library Catalogue, Google Scholar, and Psycinfo.
IMPORTANT: These citations are machine-generated, meaning they could contain errors. The most common errors you may find are incorrectly capitalizing words and incorrect punctuation.
Licensed under CC BY-NC | Excludes website content where the Library is not the copyright owner.