Literature Review Resources
A Guide for PSYC 212
Everything you need to locate, evaluate, and organize peer-reviewed psychological research — for your poster assignment and for every course after this one.
Start here (10 minutes)
1. Psychology Research Skills Tutorial — self-enrol through mêskanâs or click here Complete this first (before October 14th), including the quiz. It is built for MacEwan students using MacEwan’s databases. Problems enrolling? Email ali.foster@macewan.ca
2. MacEwan Psychology Subject Guide — https://libguides.macewan.ca/psychology Your home base. The Articles page (https://libguides.macewan.ca/psychology/articles) lists every psychology database you have access to.
3. Ali Foster is your psychology librarian. She can help with any search, at any stage. Book a consultation through the library website. Students consistently underuse this.
The process
Searching is not one search. It’s a loop: search → skim → adjust → search again. Expect to run five to ten searches before you find your core sources.
Step 1 — Turn your topic into concepts
Databases don’t understand sentences. Break your question into 2–3 core concepts.
❌ Does using social media make university students feel lonely?
✅ Concept 1: social media │ Concept 2: loneliness │ Concept 3: university students
Step 2 — Brainstorm synonyms for each concept
Researchers describe the same idea differently. Missing a synonym means missing the literature.
| Concept 1 | Concept 2 | Concept 3 |
|---|---|---|
| social media | loneliness | university students |
| social isolation | undergraduates | |
| social networking | belongingness | young adults |
Step 3 — Build the search
Combine synonyms with OR, combine concepts with AND:
(social media OR social networking OR Instagram)
AND (loneliness OR "social isolation")
AND (undergraduate* OR "university students")Step 4 — Skim, don’t read
Read the title, then the abstract, then decide. Only open the full paper if the abstract survives. You’ll discard most of what you find, and that’s normal.
Step 5 — Adjust
- Too many results (1000+)? Add a concept, use subject terms, apply limits.
- Too few (under 10)? Drop a concept, add synonyms, broaden your terms.
- Wrong results? Your keywords aren’t the ones researchers use — check the subject terms on any article that is relevant, and search those instead.
Search techniques
| Technique | How | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Phrase search | "working memory" |
Keeps words together instead of finding them separately |
| Truncation | adolescen* |
Finds adolescent, adolescents, adolescence |
| AND | stress AND sleep |
Both terms — narrows |
| OR | teen OR adolescent |
Either term — broadens |
| NOT | memory NOT dementia |
Excludes — use sparingly, it discards more than you expect |
| Parentheses | (teen OR adolescent) AND sleep |
Controls the order things combine — essential when mixing AND with OR |
Subject terms — the technique that separates good searchers from frustrated ones
Keyword searching finds your words. Subject terms find every article an expert has tagged with that concept, regardless of the author’s wording.
Every psychology article in PsycINFO is tagged using the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. To use them: find one relevant article, open its record, look at the subject terms listed, then search those terms directly.
Keyword searching is still better for very new research areas that don’t have an established subject term yet.
Limits worth applying
- Peer-reviewed only — required for this assignment
- Publication date — usually last 10–15 years, unless you need a foundational study
- Methodology — PsycINFO lets you filter by empirical study, meta-analysis, literature review
- Age group / population — narrows fast when your question is population-specific
Once you find one good paper, find five more
This is the fastest technique in this guide and most students never use it.
Backward: read the paper’s reference list. Anything cited repeatedly in your area is probably foundational.
Forward: use “Cited by” (in the database or Google Scholar) to find newer papers that cite yours. This is how you catch research published after your source.
Sideways: check the subject terms on the record and search those.
A review article or meta-analysis on your topic is worth ten empirical papers as a starting point — its reference list is a curated map of the field.
VERY HELPFUL RESOURCES
Videos
- PsycINFO in under 2 minutes (Guelph) — https://learningcommons.lib.uoguelph.ca/item/how-find-sources-through-psycinfo/
AND
https://learningcommons.lib.uoguelph.ca/item/how-develop-keywords/ Fastest overview. Includes a transcript. Watch this one if you watch nothing else. - PsycINFO video series (UNC Charlotte) — https://guides.library.charlotte.edu/c.php?g=173158&p=1143730 Eight short sequential videos plus two advanced. Good for working through one feature at a time.
- ProQuest https://proquest.libguides.com/psycinfo
Written guides
- Using PsycINFO Expertly (Trent) — https://guides.lib.trentu.ca/tutorials/PsycINFO The clearest explanation of subject terms anywhere.
- PsycINFO Help (Portland State) — https://guides.library.pdx.edu/psychology/psycinfo Compact reference for Boolean operators, truncation, and limits.
- PsycINFO Guide (FIU) — https://library.fiu.edu/PsycINFO Step-by-step, beginner-friendly.
- Subject terms and advanced search (Utah State) — https://libguides.usu.edu/psycinfo-tutorial/advanced
Evaluating what you find
Before you cite it, check:
- Peer-reviewed? If you can’t tell, look up the journal. Not everything in a database is peer-reviewed.
- Empirical study or something else? Reviews, commentaries, and editorials have their uses, but they are not primary sources.
- Does the method match the claim? A correlational study cannot establish causation, no matter how the abstract is worded. You’ll be able to spot this by October.
- Sample. Who was studied, and does it generalize to your population?
- Recency. Has this been replicated? Has the field moved on?
Getting the full text
- Use the library link on the record — never pay for an article.
- Not available at MacEwan? Request it through interlibrary loan. It’s free and usually arrives in a few days, so start early.
- Off campus? Log in with your MacEwan credentials, or start from the library website rather than Google.
Google Scholar is useful for citation chasing but is not a substitute for PsycINFO — it includes non-peer-reviewed material and lacks subject terms. If you use it, connect it to MacEwan’s library in its settings so full-text links appear.
Stay organized from the start
Keep a running document with, for each source: full citation, the finding you care about, and the page or section. You will not remember which paper said what by November.
Zotero (free, https://www.zotero.org) saves citations from databases with one click and generates APA reference lists. Learning it takes twenty minutes and saves hours across your degree.
Common mistakes
- Searching a full sentence. Databases aren’t Google.
- Giving up after one search. The first search is a starting point, not an answer.
- Only using keywords you’d use. Researchers may call it “subjective well-being,” not “happiness.”
- Ignoring reference lists. The fastest path to more sources is sitting inside the sources you already have.
- Reading full papers too early. Skim abstracts first.
- Trusting AI to find sources. Chatbots invent plausible-looking references that do not exist. Every source you cite must be one you have found in a database and read yourself.
Help
- Ali Foster, Psychology Librarian — ali.foster@macewan.ca
- MacEwan Library research help — https://library.macewan.ca
- Your instructor and TA, in class or during office hours
Struggling with a search is normal, we are here to help!