Educational Psychology

In the age of the Internet, we are accustomed to being able to access complete documents online, immediately.  While there is a great deal of content available electronically, there is still a large amount of scholarship that exists only in print.  Fortunately, by utilizing electronic databases, you have the power to search the contents of a huge variety of publications, which saves you the trouble of searching through the table of contents or flipping through various print publications.

That way, even if an article you need is not available electronically, at least you know it exists and you should be able to track it down.  This guide will explain the various forms articles can take.  Below, we will look at locating full-text articles from electronic databases.

Let's use some citations found in the database PsycINFO for our example.  I conducted a search for "cultural bias AND intelligence test*".  First of all, why did I end the word "test" with an asterisk (*)?  Because that tells the database to search for words with the root of "test" and all possible endings, so it will search for the words test, tests, testing, etc.  The asterisk is a time-saver!

I found many citations that sound relevant but let's take a look at these two:

If a citation includes one of these two icons, you are in luck - simply click on one of them to access the full-text of the article in question.

Our second citation above has a "PDF Full Text" icon, so if we click on it, a PDF of the entire article will open up and will look something like this:

You now have the option to read it online, print it, save it, email it to yourself, or save it to your "folder" or another storage device.

The first citation in our example doesn't have either Full Text icon, so it is a bit more complicated.  If the Full Text icons are absent, look instead for this button:

Use the "Find it!" button to see if the article you seek is available elsewhere, and in what format.  Clicking on the "Find it!" button opens a new window that looks like this:

What this screen will tell us is the availability of the article you are looking for within the CUNY system.  It will first look across all of the subscription databases at Hunter to see if the article is available in another database Full Text.  It will then look in CUNY+, the library catalog, to see what libraries carry a print subscription to the journal that contains the article.  Luckily for us, the first link on the list says "Full Text Online Elsevier ScienceDirect (UTL)".  That means that the article we are looking for, entitled "Immigrant-majority group differences in cognitive performance..." is available Full Text in the database Elsevier ScienceDirect.  Remember, we conducted our initial search in EBSCO's PsycINFO database.

To access the article, click on the "Full Text Online" link, which will take you to another window in the new database, like this:

Notice we are now in an entirely different database called Science Direct.  Here you have the option to download the PDF Full Text of this article, email it, print it, export it...all the same options you have in most other databases.

If you run into problems locating specific articles even after following the "Find it!" links, please ask a librarian for assistance - it can get complicated, but don't give up!