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Wellesley College Research Guides

PSYC 217: Cognition: In Class Activities

1. Consultations

Click the button below to make an appointment with me to chat about finding sources or citing them in APA format. (Optional but recommended!)

2. Challenges & Strategies

What feels challenging about research or reading scholarly articles? What strategies will you share?

3. Tips for Reading Scientific Articles

4. Search in a database

Search Tips:
When searching in a database, spelling matters! Image illustrating Venn diagrams for the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT

  • Unlike search engines, a database will not correct your typos and spelling mistakes. 
  • If you get zero results, first check that you spelled your keywords correctly.

Use quotation marks for phrase searching

  • If you are searching for multiple words or a phrase, like social media, put those words within a set of quotation marks in the search box. 
  • If you search social media, instead of "social media" most databases will search social and media as separate keywords

Use truncation to search for various endings

  • aka “wildcards” - often a * at the end of a word (check the database)
  • Use in place of letters - psych* for psychology; psychologist; psychiatric

Other factors:

  • Use Boolean Operators to connect your search terms.
  • Plural and singular nouns usually do not matter. 
  • Capitalization usually does not matter. 
  • Spaces between letters or words might matter. 
  • Especially in acronyms or the names of medication or viruses or molecules or organisms
  • Bowerbird vs “Bower Bird” both are valid terms and return results in database