A Comparison of PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO as Offered by APA and Third-Party Vendors

West, Deb; Powers, Robin; Brundage, Ken

doi:10.5260/chara.13.2.5

Cited by 2 publications

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“…This is because third-party vendors resell the database under their own interface. The resulting differences are often compared so librarians can make informed decisions balancing quality and cost (e.g., West, Powers, & Brundage, 2011). Indeed, these reviews also often discuss some of the challenges that those interested in replicating my findings may encounter.…”

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confidence: 99%

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

Burman¹

2018

History of Psychology

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Those interested in tracking trends in the history of psychology cannot simply trust the numbers produced by inputting terms into search engines like PsycINFO and then constraining by date. This essay is therefore a critical engagement with that longstanding interest to show what it is possible to do, over what period, and why. It concludes that certain projects simply cannot be undertaken without further investment by the American Psychological Association. This is because forgotten changes in the assumptions informing the database make its index terms untrustworthy for use in trend-tracking before 1967. But they can indeed be used, with care, to track more recent trends. The result is then a Distant Reading of psychology, with Digital History presented as enabling a kind of Science Studies that psychologists will find appealing. The present state of the discipline can thus be caricatured as the contemporary scientific study of depressed rats and the drugs used to treat them (as well as of human brains, mice, and myriad other topics). To extend the investigation back further in time, however, the 1967 boundary is also investigated. The author then delves more deeply into the prehistory of the database's creation, and shows in a précis of a further project that the origins of PsycINFO can be traced to interests related to American national security during the Cold War. In short: PsycINFO cannot be treated as a simple bibliographic description of the discipline. It is embedded in its history, and reflects it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

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confidence: 99%

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

Burman¹

2018

History of Psychology

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“…Because both our hypotheses were confirmed (differences in search and citation results across platforms), we not only conceptually replicated the results of West et al (2011) with different search terms and search strategies and generalized them over a decade later to the present day but extended the evidence base for irreproducibility to citation counts. We also identified several contributors to these observed discrepancies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 52%

“…The main limitation of West et al (2011) is that the extent of the problem is unclear. It is possible that high search result discrepancies are uncommon and they coincidentally searched two topics or used specific search strategies that were much more discrepant than typical.…”

Section: Existing Research On Psycinfomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although there is some informal evidence reported in Rothstein (2012), there is one specific study that looked at search performance across PsycInfo platforms. West et al (2011) investigated three different literature searches (“needle phobia” [with and without quotations] and “health and divorce” [without quotation marks]) across four PsycInfo and four APA PsycArticles platforms (APA PsycNet, EBSCO, Ovid, and ProQuest). The biggest discrepancy they found was for the search “health and divorce,” with APA PsycNet providing 6,529 references and EBSCO providing only 2,502—a difference of over 4,000 records.…”

Section: Why Research Psycinfo?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is possible that high search result discrepancies are uncommon and they coincidentally searched two topics or used specific search strategies that were much more discrepant than typical. Another limitation of West et al (2011) was that they did not investigate reasons for the observed discrepancies. The source of these apparent variations remains unexamined.…”

Section: Why Research Psycinfo?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reproducibility of PsycInfo searches across platforms.

Bedi¹,

Kumar²

2023

Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne

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PsycInfo is widely available through four vendors, each with its own unique platform. Anecdotal and preliminary evidence suggests that there are disparities in the search counts, citation counts, and results (i.e., records identified) of PsycInfo searches across platforms. The present study aimed to investigate literature search and citation reproducibility when (a) conducting apparently identical literature searches across different platforms and (b) examining the number of citations for a particular scholarly work across different platforms. A sampling of searches based on Canadian authors, Canadian topics, and topics on which Canadian researchers are recognized leaders were investigated. Results indicated that discrepancies appear to be the norm and different literature search counts, returned article records, and citation counts should be expected across platforms. Potential sources for these discrepancies were also investigated, and all were verified as contributing to divergent results. The results illuminate the method bias that exists when only using one version of PsycInfo and suggest several adverse consequences for researchers, instructors, practitioners, and students. Recommendations are provided on how to best conduct reviews of literature and citation counts.

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A Comparison of PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO as Offered by APA and Third-Party Vendors

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

Reproducibility of PsycInfo searches across platforms.

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