Most popular journal articles...

...on ScienceDirect can be viewed using their "Top 25 Hottest Articles" charts. Released quarterly, they can be viewed by subject (e.g. psychology) or journal title (e.g. journal of personality and social psychology). It's a great way of keeping up with the latest exciting research, as well as a rather interesting way of identifying potential topics for your own research.

Refining your search results on EBSCO PsycINFO...

…lets you find more relevant articles, and the good news is that EBSCO has various options to help you refine your results. Among the most useful are the ‘age’ and ‘gender’ options which enable you to find articles relating to a particular population group. These two options were discussed in more detail in the blog posting of 10th November 2010.

Other helpful options under the ‘Refine your results’ list - found on the left-hand side of the results screen – include:

• Linked Full Text – this reduces your results list to only those which have full-text available on PsycINFO. I would not recommend using this option, as PsycINFO is primarily an index of article references and contains very little full-text, so you will be losing the reference details of many very good articles. A lot of these articles will be accessible to you in full-text from UEL’s large number of full-text journal subscriptions - searchable via ‘Find an e-journal’.
• References Available – this will only find articles with reference lists available to view. Reference lists can be useful in finding further reading because they tell you what the article’s author(s) read when they wrote the article.
• Peer Reviewed – this only returns results from peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals are the highest quality, most reliable journals as all articles are reviewed by independent experts before being published.
• Publication Date - helpful if you only want the most recent articles, or articles from a certain period e.g. ones published during the 1980s.

Further down, there are options to view the most frequently occurring publications, authors and subjects. Clicking on a name or topic from any of these lists will then focus your search more narrowly on results from that publication or author, or about that subject.

Free psychology research papers...

...can be found on Cogprints. All papers are self-archived e-prints direct from the authors. It is a trusted source of research articles, but nonetheless don't forget to individually evaluate each paper before deciding whether to use it!

New psychology books in Stratford library...

...added to stock during November 2011 can be viewed from this link: November 2011 new books list. Please note that it only lists items purchased for the School of Psychology.

There are quite a lot of e-books this month, with a mixture of e-versions of new books and e-versions of existing books. Brand new e-books include, "Appreciative inquiry handbook (2nd edn.)" by David Cooperrider and "Introduction to research methods in psychology (3rd edn.)" by Dennis Howitt.

A large range of topics are covered by the new books this month, with titles including the 6th edition of Robert Sternberg's "Cognition", William West's "Exploring therapy, spirituality and healing" and Raymond Noe's "Employee training and development (5th edn.)".

All books, including e-books, can be found using the library catalogue.