Key electronic resources

• Psychology databases
• You may also want to investigate the databases for Medicine and Dentistry
• View the full list of databases

DClinPsyc students

You have access to all of Warwick’s library resources during the three years of your course but it is likely that during the first two years you will use the resources at Coventry.

When you move to Year 3, you will lose access to these resources and will have to use the resources provided by Warwick. These are very similar to those you will be familiar with from Coventry but there are some important changes that you need to be aware of.

Critically, if you are starting to research your final year dissertation and empirical study over the summer, it is recommended that you use Warwick’s resources.

 Online subject help and support

The following online tutorials will help you to improve your search skills and make better use of the Library’s electronic resources.

PsychInfo/Medline tutorial

PsycInfo is a collection of key research papers in psychology. At Warwick, we subscribe to the PsycInfo from a company called OVID. If you have used PsycInfo before, you may have used a different version of the database.

We subscribe to a number of databases from OVID, including Medline, the main database for medicine.

The following tutorial is based on Medline but you can use the same techniques when searching PsycInfo.

The Medline tutorial takes you through the process of creating a search strategy and implementing the search in Medline, the premier medical database. You will learn how to select appropriate keywords, combine them together to create an effective strategy and how to evaluate your search results. You will have the opportunity to conduct a search and obtain feedback on your progress through an interactive quiz. You need to allow up to 30 minutes to complete the tutorial.

View tutorial View tutorial - to complete the whole tutorial, including an interactive search activity, you need to be on campus. If you are off-campus, you can substitute the interactive search with the PDF guide (below).

View guide View guide - a step by step approach to on how to search Medline

Conducting a systematic literature search

There are a number of things to consider when starting a systematic review. This guide will take you through the steps of creating a systematic literature review to support systematic reviews and other research projects. The guide assumes that you are already familiar with searching the Medline database. The guide considers the different kinds of reviews you may need to do, alternatives to the PICO search framework, additional databases to search including grey literature and trial databases, advanced search techniques and search filters, recording your search, managing references and sources of further help.

View tutorial View tutorial

Literature searching

The following guides will help you to refine and save your search strategies.

Advanced search techniques and tips

There are a range of search techniques that you can use to help to refine your search strategies, such as truncation, wildcards, phrase searching and proximity searching. Some of these techniques apply across all databases, for example, truncation searching and others will vary between the different databases, for example, proximity searching. The following table will show you how to apply these techniques in the following databases – Medline, Embase, PsycInfo, CINAHL, Web of Science, ASSIA, Scopus and the Cochrane Library.

View tutorial View tutorial

Saving your search strategies

All databases will allow you to create a Personal Account in order to save the searches that you are working on. You can re-load searches at a later date to edit them or to run an updated search. Here are the instructions for creating an account with the OVID databases – Medline, Embase and PsycInfo.

View tutorial View tutorial