The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with PsycINFO, an indispensable tool for bibliographic searches in Psychology. Although using the program fluently requires a little practice it is extremely user-friendly, as are the library staff. So don't hesitate to ask for help.
The general topic you will be looking up is research related to sex differences in behavior. Among the many behaviors of interest to those studying the biology of behavior are drug addiction and aggressive behavior. I want you to focus your PsycINFO search on either drug addiction (sometimes called drug abuse) or aggressive behavior, with a focus on sex differences. The purpose of this assignment is to force you to play around on PsycINFO for yourself, but there are three general tasks for you to complete.
1) The first part of the assignment is do a search by topic. You are to find 5 references dealing with one of the two topics described above. The best way to start searching is to use subject terms or descriptors which are assigned by the American Psychological Association to each article. It will be necessary for you to read the abstract associated with articles with promising titles (an abstract is a short paragraph describing the study--usually available on PsycINFO) to determine if they are really what you are looking for. Dissertations are not appropriate references for this assignment, although they may appear in PsychINFO. Book chapters are OK for your list of references.
Looking up either of these topics as such will result in thousands of references ("drug addiction" will give you over 6000, "aggression" will give you over 19,000--go ahead, try it!). Clearly, it will be necessary for you to narrow down your search a bit (up to 75 references is usually manageable to get through in one sitting)...a focus on sex differences will help to narrow the field. Still you may get a huge number of references. Your job is to focus this list by searching for studies that use a particular approach (for example, by studying hormonal factors in animal subjects, or by studying genetic influences on behavior), or whatever other "variable" (such as age, socioeconomic status, etc.) you choose. These limits that you use in your search can be considered the "theme" that ties all of the articles together. Your articles must be related in some way (as if you were doing a research paper on the topic and these are the articles you will be referencing).
2) The next part of the assignment is to do a search by "author", not by topic. From your list of five articles, pick out one that interests you in particular. Now, generate an additional list of 3 articles written by one of the authors in your chosen article. Try searching for each of the authors of your chosen reference and see what you find (the first author may be new to the field and have no other works, while the third author may be the expert with 100 publications--you just have to check and see!). Pick the author whose articles seem most relevant and produce a list of three of their other articles (either the most relevant, or the most recent if there's a lot). Your chosen author need not be the first author on the papers. If the author/authors of your article seem to have no other published works (unlikely but possible) then pick another author or article from your first list.
3) Finally, I want you to actually find one of the 8 articles in your lists and hand in the first page. The first page must come from a journal article, not a book (Get it? The point is to have you actually get experience with the on-line or print serials collection--I trust you know how to find a book in the library but that's not the point here). To find the article, you must use Tripod (the database of Tri-Co library holdings) to find which libraries contain which journals. In the past, this part of the assignment always required students to physically go to the library and use a photocopy machine. Now, we are fortunate enough to have hundreds of journals available on-line, which allows you to actually download a printable version of the article to your computer. Only print the 1st page! Of course, it's possible that the journal is not indexed on-line (most articles pre-1995 are not on-line), but is on the shelf somewhere in the Tri-Co, which will require you to use the ancient technology of the photocopy machine. If the article is not in the Bi-Co or Tri-Co (a distinct possibility), you will have to order your article through inter-library loan, although you should be aware that your article may take several weeks to get here. There will be no extensions given for the purpose of waiting for your article. If you save the assignment to the last minute, you will not be able to use inter-library loan. The point is to make you actually figure out the physical location and retrieve the article of interest.
What to hand in: The assignment you turn in should consist of three sections. Section 1 should contain a printout of references to 5 journal articles sharing a common approach to understanding either of the behavioral phenomena described above. The printout should contain the following information: author(s), title, journal, date, volume, page numbers, and abstract (if available). WRITE A BRIEF PARAGRAPH DESCRIBING THE COMMON THEME THAT TIES TOGETHER THESE ARTICLES. Section 2 should contain a list of three other articles by your author of interest (with the same information-authors, title, journal, abstract, etc.). Section 3 should consist of an attached first page from one of the articles.