Skip to Main Content

Psychology

This guide is your starting place for research in the field of psychology.

Searching Library Databases

Top psychology databases

A library database provides access to the full text contents of thousands of scholarly journals. Articles published in scholarly journals are highly focused and written by researchers for other researchers and experts in the field. They either report on primary research they have done themselves or provide a review and evaluation of the body of work done in a given area.

Pro tip: It's good research strategy to do your searches in MORE THAN ONE database.

Below are the research databases we recommend for finding psychology articles:

What is a database?

A library database provides access to the full text contents of thousands of scholarly journals, sometimes covering a particular discipline or sometimes multi-disciplinary in scope, meaning they may cover many subject areas.

Databases come with tools that help you refine your search to get more relevant results, as well as links to related articles. In most cases, you can be confident that the articles you find will be credible sources to incorporate into your writing.

Key features of most databases:

  • ability to filter results by date
  • ability to filter results by content or publication type, ie, journal article, book, reference
  • ability to narrow results by subject or discipline
  • links to related articles
  • links to articles that "cite" the one in your result list

Add Google Scholar to your set of research tools

Google Scholar is a search engine that covers much of the scholarly, peer reviewed literature from academic publishers, plus conferences, theses and dissertations, abstracts and more. Some of the content is available full text, and some will be citation-only. 

You can configure your settings to include links to articles available from Kwantlen Polytechnic Library subscription journals to avoid hitting publishers' paywalls. See the screenshot below.

Screenshot of enabling library links in Google Scholar

 

Need an article/journal that isn't in our collection? 

If you are looking for a particular article in that journal, you can place an interlibrary loan. The Library can usually email it to you within 2-3 days.