WVU Libraries

Mountaineer Spirit

BY MONTE MAXWELL
WVU LIBRARIES

WVU Libraries has made research a little easier for psychology faculty and students with the addition of PsycARTICLES, an online database of 43 journals from the field.

“It’s the difference between night and day,” psychology professor Stan Cohen said. “The time savings alone will be incredible.”

Before, finding a needed article in one of these journals required going to the Downtown Campus Library, finding and retrieving the journal from the stacks, photocopying the article and repeating the process for each desired article. And then the actual work could begin.

Now, the task simply requires finding a computer with Internet access and clicking a few keys. Students and faculty can access the database, PsycARTICLES, from the WVU Libraries homepage,
http://www.libraries.wvu.edu. It joins WVU Libraries’ collection of more than 10,000 electronic journals.

Cohen expects the online access to benefit psychology students who are often asked to do brief abstracts of journal articles. Rather than a few hundred students racing into the library to grab the same journals, they can read them online from home.

Psychology professor Barry Edelstein finds the ability to do research from his office or home appealing. “You can’t sit in the library all the time and write a manuscript,” Edelstein said.

Both educators see advantages just in the increased access to quality sources. For faculty who subscribe to journals included in the database, the access equals financial savings. PsycARTICLES is a database of full-text articles from journals published by the American Psychological Association, the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association, and Hogrefe & Huber. The database includes all material from the print journals from 1988 to the present with the exception of ads and editorial board lists.