Psychology in the news...

…can be a great way of seeing how the wider world (well, the media, at least) perceive and report both psychology and the psychology profession. Generally, if the stories make it into the news then they are likely to be either ‘fun’ stories or fascinating new discoveries. Either way, news stories can be a way of finding out new things either in your own field of interest or in areas of psychology that you may never have considered. Relatively frequent examples of psychology (or psychologists) appearing in new stories range from educational psychologists being interviewed about ‘behaviour in schools’ to personal tales of amnesia or other such memory dysfunction.

Finding mainstream news articles can be done in two main ways. The first way is through the library’s subscription to a database called Nexis UK, which provides access to several decades worth of articles from all of the UK’s national newspapers (both broadsheet and tabloid), many regional UK newspapers and a range of international newspapers (including ones in foreign languages). You can normally find today’s issue, as well as ones from several decades ago, so it is a fantastic resource! It can be accessed through the library's Databases and e-Journals webpage (click on 'N' for Nexis UK).

Aside from newspapers, the other main way to find news stories these days is on the Internet. More ‘traditional’ sources such as BBC News and Reuters are very effective, although broader (but less reliable) searches can also be done through news search engines such as Google News and Yahoo News Search.