This research guide is intended as an overview of library resources and services of particular relevance for students in Professor Carey Cooper’s Spring 2015 course
HUD 4120, Methods of Empirical Research. The resources, primarily electronic and accessible on and off campus, have been selected as ones supporting the objective of the course, i.e., to provide students with an “understanding of empirical research, how to critique and design research, and how to integrate research and its methods with other disciplines and society at large.” This guide 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
Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
E-Collections
Handbooks of Research
Reviews of Research
Citation Indexes
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
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 – The 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 – The 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).
Abstracts in Social Gerontology (CU) - 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 (CU), 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.
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.
EdITLib Education & Digital Technology Library – Database of peer-reviewed and published international journal articles and conference papers on the latest research, developments, and applications related to all aspects of educational technology and e-learning.
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.
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.
Family and Society Studies Worldwide (CU) – 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 (CU) – Includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to family studies, including marriage, divorce, family therapy, and other areas of key relevance to the discipline.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts – Abstracts and indexes the international literature in linguistics and related disciplines in the language sciences, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics; coverage from 1973 to present.
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 In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations and Ovid MEDLINE - 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.
PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service) (CU) – Contains citations to journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, “gray literature,” research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies, and Internet resources pertaining to public affairs and public policy issues.
Professional Development Collection – Designed for professional educators, this database provides a highly specialized collection of nearly 520 high-quality education journals, including more than 350 peer-reviewed titles. The database also contains more than 200 educational reports.
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.
Sociological Abstracts (CU) – Abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences, covering such major areas as culture and social structure, family and social welfare, history and theory of sociology, radical sociology, rural and urban sociology, and the sociology of the arts, business, and education.
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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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Encyclopedias and Dictionaries
Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology: A User’s Guide to Sociological Language (CU) – Provides basic and secondary definitions for terms used in the field of sociology. Many entries have one or more readings, as well as bibliographic references for further study; also includes biographical sketches of prominent sociologists.
Cambridge Dictionary of Statistics (2nd Edition) – Contains approximately 3,000 headwords in all areas of statistics, including medical, survey, theoretical, and applied, and short biographies of more than 100 important statisticians.
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 Children and Childhood In History and Society – Presents the social and cultural history of childhood from antiquity to the present; examines this history through articles on education, parenting, child labor, economics, images of childhood, children’s literature, play, toys and games, health, physiology, law, the criminal justice system, and social welfare.
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (CU) – Covers the cognitive sciences in the broadest sense; reviews the common themes of information and information processing, representation, and computation, with in-depth coverage of the core areas of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and neuroscience.
Encyclopedia of Education (2nd Edition) – The 2003 version of the classic resource in education and related fields.
Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction – Covers a wide range of HCI-related topics, such as concepts, design, usability, evaluation, innovations, and applications of HCI in organizations around the globe.
Encyclopedia of Human Development – With over 600 entries organized from A to Z, this work covers a range of topics including adolescence, cognitive development, education, family, gender differences, identity, longitudinal research, and more.
Encyclopedia of Relationships across the Lifespan – Cross-disciplinary reference volume with entries for more than 500 terms and concepts related to the myriad human interaction types from birth to death.
Encyclopedia of Statistics in Behavioral Science (CU) – 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.
Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities and Technologies – Presents an in-depth analysis of the conceptual and technical impacts of virtual environments in our global village, with emphases on telecommunications, Internet and Web technology, and computer science.
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, 2001) – 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.
Historical Encyclopedia of School Psychology – Comprises about 500 entries dealing with the following “information domains” in the field: assessment; interventions; consultation; research, evaluation, and accountability; in-service education; administration and supervision; major events; significant persons; training and practice settings; organizations and regulatory agencies; and professional issues.
International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family (2nd Edition, 2003) – Includes articles specific to countries and to religious traditions, examining the history of family life within these cultures and discussing how families have been and are affected by political and social change.
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (CU) – 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.
Learning and Memory (2nd Edition, 2003) – Provides an overview of the full range of current knowledge about learning and memory, revised from the 1992 edition. Features new articles and article updates that capture advances in the changing fields of memory, neuroscience, and cognition.
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E-Collections (Text, Images, Sound)
Alexander Street Press Databases (CU) – Themed collections of print documents, video, and recorded sound across disciplines; notable databases include Alexander Street Literature (cross-searchable collections covering the literatures of place, race, and gender), Caribbean Literature (a collection of poetry and fiction produced in the Caribbean during the 19th and 20th centuries), Ethnographic Video Online (intended to be a visual encyclopedia of human behavior and culture, online in streaming video), and North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories (personal views of what it meant to immigrate to the United States and Canada between 1880 and 1950).
Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works (CU) – 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 (CU) – 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 Education, Science, Social Sciences, Technology, 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.
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.
SAGE Education Full-Text Collection – A subset of Sage Journals Online, provides access to and advanced searching of the full text of 36 education-related journals.
SAGE Psychology Full-Text Collection – A subset of Sage Journals Online, provides access to the full text of 34 psychology-related journals from SAGE Publications.
SAGE Sociology Full-Text Collection – A subset of Sage Journals Online, provides access to and advanced searching of the full text of 36 sociology-related journals.
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Handbooks of Research
Blackwell Reference Online (CU) – Provides full-text access to reference works in the social sciences and humanities; see research handbooks and companions in Psychology, Sociology, and other subject areas. Notable titles include The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities, The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, the Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes, the Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Interpersonal Processes, the Handbook of Research Methods in Clinical Psychology, and The Handbook of Education and Human Development, among others.
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.
Research Methods in Family Therapy (2nd Edition) – Offers the full range of research methods relevant for family researchers in 21 chapters, grouped under sections on qualitative methods, mixed methods, quantitative methods, and advanced quantitative methods.
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Reviews of Research
Annual Reviews (CU) – Reviews of topics in biomedical, physical, and social sciences published as annual journals; see series for Neuroscience, 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, 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 (CU) – 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 (CU) – 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.
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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.
Internet Archive – A non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies, and music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages.
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.
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; 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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