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Best Latino/a Psychology Databases
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new windowAbstracts professional and scholarly psychology journals and book chapters, plus dissertations and technical reports. The coverage includes over 1300 journals in 27 languages from approximately 50 countries. 1887-present. Updated monthly.
- APA PsycBooks This link opens in a new windowProvides electronic access to thousands of scholarly and professional titles published by the American Psychological Association (APA), including recent titles in psychological and behavioral science, plus a substantial backfile of classic and historic works.
- APA PsycArticles This link opens in a new windowProvides access to more than 100 important journals in all subject areas relevant to psychology. Journals published by the American Psychological Association, the Canadian Psychological Association, and English language journals from Hogrefe Publishing are included. Most titles are covered from volume one to the present. Citations in PsycINFO have links to the full-text in PsycARTICLES.
- Counseling and Therapy in Video This link opens in a new windowProvides a rich online collection of video available for the study of psychotherapy, psychology, psychiatric counseling, and social work - 400 hours and more than 330 videos, when completed. The database includes filmed footage of actual therapy sessions, re-enacted therapy sessions, and scripted sessions designed by counseling professionals to illustrate common issues and scenarios that arise during courses of therapy.
- Diversity Collection This link opens in a new windowA collection of three full-text databases, namely GenderWatch, Ethnic NewsWatch, and Alt-PressWatch. GenderWatch enhances gender and women's studies, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) research by providing authoritative perspectives from 1970 to present. GenderWatch provides access to over 300 titles, with more than 250 in full-text, from an array of academic, radical, community and independent presses. Ethnic NewsWatch is a comprehensive full-text database of the newspapers, magazines, journals and newsletters of the ethnic, minority and native presses as well as many journals concerned with issues of race and ethnicity, with archival material back to 1985. Alt-PressWatch includes over 1.5M articles from more than 300 small sources including unique, independent voices from respected and cited grassroots newspapers, magazines, and journals covering the arts and all viewpoints across the social and political spectrum from 1970 to present.
- HAPI This link opens in a new windowIncludes citations for documents, journal articles, and original literary works on Latin American topics in the social sciences and humanities from 1970 to present. Over 500 journals, published worldwide, are indexed. Includes citations for articles and documents on Mexico, all Central American and South American countries, and the Caribbean. Hispanics/Latinos in the United States are also included.
- Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new windowThis database is a primary resource for accessing the latest research in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database draws information from an international selection of over 2,600 journals and other serials publications, plus conference papers, books, and dissertations. Records added after 1974 contain in-depth and nonevaluative abstracts of journal articles. 1963-present. Updated monthly.
- Social Science Premium Collection This link opens in a new windowContains more than 1,800 full-text articles and over 14,000 abstracts from scholarly journals and dissertations in the social sciences such as criminal justice, education, language behavior, linguistics, political science, sociology, etc.
Search Techniques
Searching databases for journal articles is a bit more challenging than using tools such as Google Scholar. The good news is that you have a lot more control over how you design your search. This also means you should get better, more targeted results. A search for the question: How does a latino/a's spirituality influence their self identification? could look like this.
You can use an asterisk at the end of a word to retrieve various endings. For example, adolescen* will retrieve adolescent and adolescence.
Other search tips that are useful in searching APA PsycInfo, APA PsycArticles, and APA PsycBooks:
- Age Groups: Some age groups (e.g., teens) are easy to define in a search, but the age groups feature will be a life saver for other groups (e.g., middle age).
- Methodology: The most useful choices are:
- Empirical Study - reports the results of original research
- Literature Review - see if someone has already examined your topic. This can save time and also provide guidance on how to write a literature review.
- Thesaurus: If you are not sure about what terms to use, the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms is very helpful.
If the full-text of an article is not available in the database, click on the Find It @ SCU Libraries link to see if it's available elsewhere. If not, you can request the article via Interlibrary Loan. This is a free service and you will usually get the article in 1-2 business days. Never pay a publisher for an article!