Skip to Main Content

PSY 440: Physiological Psychology

This is a course guide for the course PSY 440: Physiological Psychology

Databases

Best Bets are databases and journals Welder Library subscribes to or allow for open access. Please start your research using these resources. Other resources found here are available at Welder Library or on the internet. Use our Interlibrary Loan service to request the article you are looking for. 

Tips

  • In the databases, look for PDF links or HTML full text links when searching CINAHL, MEDLINE, etc. 
  • If full text is not available through the databases, articles can be requested through Interlibrary Loan. The article will be delivered to your UMary email and will take about 3 to 4 business days.  

Best Bets: 

  • PsycInfo - Resource for abstracts for scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations in behavioral science and mental health. 
  • PubMed - PubMed comprises more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher websites. 
  • MEDLINE with Full Text - Provides authoritative medical information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and pre-clinical sciences found on MEDLINE, plus the database provides full text for more than 1,470 journals indexed in MEDLINE. ​
  • Google Scholar - Google Scholar is an online, freely accessible search engine that lets users look for both physical and digital copies of articles. It searches scholarly works from a variety of sources, including academic publishers and universities looking for peer-reviewed articles. 

Other Resources 

  • PsycArticle - Definitive source of full-text, peer reviewed scholarly and scientific articles in psychology. 
  • Academic Search Ultimate - This database provides access to more than 30,000 active full text journals and magazines cited in key subject indexes. The combination of academic journals, magazines, periodicals, reports, books and videos meets the needs of scholars in virtually every discipline ranging from astronomy, anthropology, biomedicine, engineering, health, law, literacy, mathematics, pharmacology, women’s studies, zoology and more. 
  • TandF Online: Taylor & Francis Group publishes quality peer-reviewed journals from leading scientists and researchers, to scholars and professionals operating at the top of their field. 

Searching Tips

  • Start with one concept at a time. That way you can mix and match search sets. Start with one and add the others one at a time. You may need to mix and match them in different combinations. Also, you might find that you can only use two concepts together out of three. When you have multiple concepts it's easy to end up with nothing. 
  • Combine terms with OR to get more results.  If there isn't much on your topic, combine terms (ex. subject and keyword terms) with OR to find the most articles. 
  • Combine terms with AND to get fewer results and to bring topics together.  
  • Boolean started with... George Boole! He was a mathematician who had the happy thought that you can combine sets with AND, OR, NOT.
  • Spell out terms. Some databases, like PubMed, may not recognize abbreviations. For better results when using abbreviations and acronyms it is best to type them out. 
  • Use available subject terms.  Most of the databases will provide subject headings for related searches. By clicking on these, you will get expanded search results. 
  • You can find good articles by looking at References and Cited By. 
  • Reference are the articles and documents listed in an article's bibliography or reference list. This will take you into the past, to older articles. 
  • It may be beneficial to look at Citing Articles or Cited By links in search engines like CINAHL. It is best to use literature from the past five years. Scholarly literature from the past five years is considered to be current literature. 
  • Define landmark articles and determine how they have been used in previous literature.