YouTube videos

I find YouTube videos are an engaging way of understanding both overviews of topics and specific details. For example, Andy Field’s channel includes lectures on different themes of statistics in psychology, as well as practical step-by-step walkthroughs of how to use the statistics application SPSS. Furthermore, I search for keywords of whatever I’m writing an assessment on and there are often lectures given on that particular subject.

Psychology Today website

Psychology Today is an American magazine published every 2 months; their website is full of very accessible and recent articles. I find it’s great for finding up-to-date opinions on specific topics that relate to assessments, as well as maintaining an awareness of important psychological developments.

PsycARTICLES

PsycARTICLES is a database of full-text articles from journals published by the American Psychological Association and others. As well as searching for keywords, I search for articles by browsing through journals and clicking to the tables of contents for previous or later volumes and issues. Moreover, an alerting function is available that sends emails to notify me that a new issue has been added to the database. I have found PsycARTICLES particularly useful for recently released articles.

ScienceDirect

ScienceDirect is a database of full-text articles from over 3,500 academic journals, but also hosts 34,000 e-books. It covers physical sciences, engineering, life sciences, health sciences, social sciences and humanities. Given the wide range of sciences it includes, I think it’s great for getting different perspectives of whatever assessment topic I’m writing about. I like it for its advanced search function, which allows me to search as broadly or as precisely as I like.

Scopus

Scopus is the world’s largest abstract and citation database. Since it only displays the abstract, you can’t take a deep dive into the articles. However, I find it’s good for getting an overview of important articles, which allows me to identify trends in the literature. I find the website is really easy to use and navigate, so I can use it to find articles, which I can then get the full text of using PsycARTICLES or ScienceDirect.

Mendeley

Mendeley makes referencing really easy and quick, and allows me to look over all my articles all in one place, which facilitates comparison between articles. Simply download Mendeley, with the web importer and the plug-in for Word.