This virtual handout is intended as an overview of library resources and services of particular relevance for Ruth Morin’s Spring 2015 course CCPX 5546, Research Perspectives on Critical Social Problems. The resources, primarily electronic and accessible on and off campus, have been selected as ones supporting the aim of the course, i.e., “the exploration of research based upon
the interface of social and clinical psychology and development projects”; these databases can facilitate research on such topics as “eating disorders across the lifespan, altruism and mental health, coping with the aftermath of genocide, terror, personal growth in the wake of trauma, and effects of disability on the individual and family.” This blog post also includes a section describing research consultation and assistance services and options for document retrieval and delivery available to all members of the Teachers College community.
Library Resources
Online Catalogs
Periodical Indexes
Federated Search Engines
Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
E-Collections (Text, Images, Sound)
Handbooks of Research
Reviews of Research
Citation Indexes
Tests and Measurements
Digital Archives
Bibliography and Citation Management Programs
Library Services and Publications
All students, faculty, and researchers also have access to a number of important library services and publications provided to support and facilitate research and study in their particular programs and disciplines.
Online Catalogs
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are the official subject terms prescribed by the Library of Congress for the cataloging of books and are in use in essentially all academic libraries. To find works pertaining to research perspectives on critical social problems and related subjects, it may be useful to use some of the subject terms, or combinations of terms, listed below when searching the online catalogs of libraries at Teachers College, Columbia University, and other institutions.
Child development
Child psychotherapy
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy
Behavior therapy
Spirituality
Religious education of children
Children — Religious life
Spiritual life
Anorexia nervosa
Eating disorders
Eating disorders in adolescence
Eating disorders in children
Eating disorders in men
Eating disorders in women
Behavior modification
Health attitudes
Health behavior
Autism in children
Self-injurious behavior
Cognitive therapy
Anxiety
Anxiety disorders
Anxiety in adolescence
Anxiety in children
Anxiety in old age
Depression
Depression in adolescence
Depression in children
Depression in old age
Body image
Adolescence
Social media
*EDUCAT – The most definitive record of the holdings of the Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College, including books, e-books, journals, e-journals, dissertations, media, and other specialized collections of all kinds.
See our library’s video tutorial on searching EDUCAT.
*CLIO – A union catalog of Columbia University Libraries (exclusive of the libraries of Teachers College, the Columbia Law School, and Jewish Theological Seminary), providing the most definitive record of individual libraries’ holdings of books, e-books, journals, e-journals, dissertations, media, and other specialized collections of all kinds.
*WorldCat – A union catalog of the contents of over 10,000 libraries worldwide, providing the means to do exhaustive searching by author, title, subject, and numerous other criteria and to find locations for specific items in libraries nearby and elsewhere.
See our library’s video tutorial on searching WorldCat.
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Periodical Indexes
*APA PscyNET – Single search interface for PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycCRITIQUES, and PsycEXTRA (see E-Collections below).
See our library’s video tutorial on searching APA PsycNET.
*Abstracts in Social Gerontology – Includes bibliographic records and abstracts for articles covering essential aspects of the discipline, including the psychology of aging, elder abuse, society and the elderly, and other key areas of relevance.
Academic Search Premier – A multidisciplinary database providing full text for more than 4,600 journals, including nearly 3,900 peer-reviewed titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals. See also *Academic Search Complete, a scholarly, multidisciplinary full-text database, with more than 8,500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. The database features PDF content going back as far as 1887.
*AgeLine – Focuses exclusively on the population aged 50+ and on issues of aging. The premier source for the literature of social gerontology, it includes aging-related content from the health sciences, psychology, sociology, social work, economics, and public policy.
*CINAHL Plus with Full Text – The online version of the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, providing full text for more than 750 journals indexed in CINAHL from 1981-present.
ERIC – Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to provide extensive access to educational-related periodical literature, ERIC (which stands for Educational Resources Information Center) provides coverage of conferences, meetings, government documents, theses, dissertations, reports, audiovisual media, bibliographies, directories, books, and monographs. In addition to this version, made available via the ProQuest platform, ERIC is also accessible via the U.S. government ERIC site, through Ebsco ERIC, and via all of these providers on the Columbia University Libraries website.
Education Full Text – Provides comprehensive coverage of an international range of English-language periodicals, monographs, and yearbooks. Indexing coverage begins June 1983; abstracts are included beginning spring 1994; full text of some journals is available beginning in January 1996.
Education Index Retro – Provides cover-to-cover indexing for an international range of English-language periodicals and yearbooks; coverage from 1929 through mid-1983.
Education Research Complete – Provides indexing and abstracts for more than 2,100 journals, as well as full text for more than 1,200 journals, and includes full text for nearly 500 books and monographs.
Family and Society Studies Worldwide – A core resource providing comprehensive coverage of research, policy, and practice literature in the fields of marriage and family science, human ecology, human development, and social welfare. Coverage spans from 1970 to the present.
Family Studies Abstracts – Includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to family studies, including marriage, divorce, family therapy, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
MEDLINE (Ovid) – Ovid MEDLINE covers the international literature on biomedicine, including the allied health fields and the biological and physical sciences, humanities, and information science as they relate to medicine and health care. Information is indexed from approximately 3,900 journals published world-wide. The database is also available as EBSCO MEDLINE through the Columbia University Libraries.
*MEDLINE, MEDLINE Daily, and MEDLINE In Process (1966 to Present) (now known as MEDLINE In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations) -This database consists of In-Process and PubMed-not-MEDLINE records from the National Library of Medicine The In-Process records are ones that will be put into the Medline database after they have been enhanced with MeSH headings. PubMed-not-MEDLINE records are records from journals found in PubMed but not selected for MEDLINE.
*ProQuest – Provides broad multidisciplinary coverage of scholarly journals, newspapers, dissertations, and other types of publications; for international coverage and access to full texts of dissertations only, search Digital Dissertations, a subset of ProQuest.
*PsycINFO – Covers the scholarly literature in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences.
*Social Sciences Full Text – Provides coverage of English-language journals across social science disciplines, with indexing from 1983, abstracting from 1984, and select access to full text from 1984 to the present.
*Social Services Abstracts – Provides bibliographic coverage of current research focused on social work, human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy, and community development. The database indexes over 1,300+ serials publications and includes abstracts of journal articles and dissertations and citations to book reviews.
*Social Work Abstracts – Offers extensive coverage of more than 450 social work and human services journals dating back to 1965. Produced by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the database provides citations and abstracts dealing with all aspects of the social work field, including theory and practice, areas of service, and social issues and problems.
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Federated Search Engines
*Quicksearch (via Columbia University Libraries) – To search the catalog, multiple periodical indexes, and other web resources simultaneously within a variety of subjects and disciplinary subcategories.
*Super Search (via Gottesman Libraries) – To search some or all of our periodical indexes, plus EDUCAT and CLIO, simultaneously for books, journal articles, reports, dissertations, etc.
Google Scholar – Provides the means to search for scholarly research across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites.
See our library’s Google Scholar video tutorial.
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Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
Child Development – An encyclopedia covering human development from conception through adolescence, summarizing the latest research on physical, cognitive, social and emotional development and behavior, including areas of law, medicine, psychiatry, and demography among others.
Encyclopedia of Adult Development – Contains 106 articles on adult development that were written by more than 75 specialists in such diverse fields as anthropology, communication, education, health sciences, history, and psychology.
Encyclopedia of Human Development – With over 600 entries organized from A-Z, this three-volume Encyclopedia covers topics as diverse as adolescence, cognitive development, education, family, gender differences, identity, longitudinal research, and more.
Encyclopedia of Statistics in Behavioral Science – Provides complete coverage of current statistical methods ranging through confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, random effect/multilevel modeling, generalized linear models, computationally intensive methods such as the bootstrap, and more.
Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders – Provides detailed information on mental disorders and conditions, including entries for all 150 disorders classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, text revision (DSM-IV-TR). It also features entries for prescription, alternative, and over-the-counter drugs, as well as the various therapies used to treat mental disorders.
Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology (2nd Edition) – In more than 650 entries covers the entire spectrum of psychology, including notable people, theories and terms; landmark case studies and experiments; applications of psychology in advertising, medicine and sports; and career information.
International Encyclopedia of Marriage and the Family (2nd Edition) – Includes articles specific to countries and to religious traditions, examining the history of family life within these cultures and discussing how families have been affected by political and social change.
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences – This key reference work comprises 4,000 articles, commissioned by 52 Section Editors, and includes 90,000 bibliographic references as well as comprehensive name and subject indexes.
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E-Collections (Text, Images, Sound)
*Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works – Real transcripts of therapy and counseling sessions and first-person narratives illuminating the experience of mental illness and its treatment, as well as reference works to contextualize the primary material. First person narratives includes diaries, letters, autobiographies, oral histories, and personal memoirs.
*Counseling and Therapy in Video – comprised of training videos, reenactments, and actual therapy sessions conducted by renowned counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and clinicians, this three-volume collection presents a firm grounding in the theoretical modalities of counseling and psychotherapy, while expanding into new and emerging areas such as social media, veterans, cyber-bullying, mindfulness, and neuroscience.
Ebrary – Online books across a range of subject areas; searchable, under All Subjects, by Medicine, Science, etc., and various sub-topics, and by author, title, and other criteria.
JSTOR – An online archive of over 1,200 leading scholarly journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. Journals are always included from volume 1, issue 1 and include previous and related titles.
*PEP Web (Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing Archive) – Provides access to an extensive archive of both books and journal articles, including the full text of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Freud’s letters to his major collaborators, major works of other major psychoanalytic authors, and the full text of many premier English-language journals in psychoanalysis.
PsycARTICLES – A full-text database of journals published by the American Psychological Association and other publishers in subject areas such as applied psychology, health, theory, research, social/personality, and more.
PsycBOOKS – A full text database of books published by the American Psychological Association, classic books, and entries from the Encyclopedia of Psychology.
PsycCRITIQUES – Full-text reviews of current books and some popular films, videos, and software, as well as comparative reviews of books in the field of psychology.
PsycEXTRA – A gray literature database comprised of material written for professionals and disseminated outside of peer-reviewed journals; documents include newsletters, magazines, newspapers, technical and annual reports, government reports, consumer brochures, and more.
PsychiatryOnline – Provides access to the full text of journals published by American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. (APPI), including the American Journal of Psychiatry and the Journal of Neuropsychiatry.
SAGE Psychology Full-Text Collection – Provides access to the full text of 34 psychology-related journals from SAGE Publications.
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Handbooks of Research
*Blackwell Reference Online – Provides full-text access to reference works in the social sciences and humanities; see research handbooks and companions in Psychology and other subject areas. Notable titles include the Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes, the Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Interpersonal Processes, and the Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology.
Psychologists’ Desk Reference (2nd Edition, 2005) – An important clinical psychology handbook comprising 140 chapters divided into 11 sections covering assessment and diagnosis; psychological testing; individual psychotherapy and treatment; couples, family, and group treatment; child and adolescent treatment; biology and pharmacotherapy; self-help resources; ethical and legal issues; forensic matters; practice management; and professional resources.
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Reviews of Research
*Annual Reviews – Reviews of topics in biomedical, physical, and social sciences published as annual journals; see series for Clinical Psychology, Medicine, Psychology, Sociology, and others.
Review of Educational Research – A publication of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the RER publishes quarterly critical, integrative reviews of research literature bearing on education, including conceptualizations, interpretations, and syntheses of scholarly work.
Review of Research in Education - A publication of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the RRE provides an annual overview and descriptive analysis of selected topics of relevant research literature through critical and synthesizing essays.
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Citation Indexes
Scopus – Abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze, and visualize research.
See a video tutorial from Columbia University Libraries at Using Citation Analysis Tools in Scopus.
Web of Science - Comprising the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Science Citation Index Expanded, this database supports searching by topic, author, or publication name, and is also a major means for doing cited reference searching, to find articles that cite a person’s work.
See a video tutorial from Columbia University Libraries at Using Citation Analysis Tools in Web of Science.
Google Scholar – Provides the means to search by author or publication title, and indicates and provides links to works that have cited the documents retrieved.
See our library’s Citation Indexes video tutorial on citation searching via the Web of Science and Google Scholar.
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Tests and Measurements
*Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HAPI) – Information on approximately 15,000 measurement instruments (i.e. questionnaires, interview schedules, checklists, coding schemes, rating scales, etc.) in the fields of health and psychosocial sciences.
*Mental Measurements Yearbook (Ovid) – Produced by the Buros Institute, this database contains extensive information about and reviews of English-language, commercially available, standardized tests covering educational skills, personality, vocational aptitude, psychology, and related areas, as included in the printed Mental Measurements Yearbooks.
For further information on access to actual tests, measurements, instruments, scales, etc., see our Knowledge Database entry at http://library.tc.columbia.edu/kb/idx.php/0/196/article/.
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Digital Archives
Academic Commons – Columbia University’s online repository, where current faculty, students, and staff can deposit the results of their scholarly work and research.
PocketKnowledge – The social archive of Teachers College, including unpublished manuscripts and archives from the library’s collections, documents from other departments and administrative offices College-wide, and the work of TC students, faculty, and researchers.
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Bibliography and Citation Management Programs
Citation Management Software – An extensive description of and guide to the use of BibDesk, EndNote, Papers, Mendeley, and Zotero, including a comparison of their relative merits, produced by the Columbia University Libraries’ Digital Science Center.
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Library Services and Publications
Ask a Librarian a Question – To explore a variety of kinds of research support: submit an email reference query to librarians onsite; request a research consultation with a Gottesman librarian; or review frequently asked questions via the library’s Knowledge Database.
E-Reserves – Provides online access to digital course readings, including e-journal articles and book chapters, as well as call numbers for physical course reserves materials (books, DVDs, videos, etc.).
Document Delivery – The means to recommend items for purchase and/or to request from other libraries materials (dissertations, book chapters, journal articles, etc.) not available through the Gottesman or Columbia University Libraries.
Learning at the Library – The Gottesman Libraries’ blog via the Pressible platform, including content in many topical areas contributed by library staff members.
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