Library Psychology 220

Lab reports follow a particular structure, including:

• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion

Through these sections, you can think of your report as starting broad, narrowing to specifics, and then broadening out again.

Introduction:
This section introduces the reader to theoretical background and related studies, describing previous relevant research and positioning your current study in relation to these. Here is where you describe the specific issue you will examine in your study. You should end this section with your hypothesis, transitioning to the specific concerns of your study and leading into the methods section.

Methods:
This section describes the design of your study, including dependent and independent variables, participants, equipment, and specific procedure.

Results:
This section will start with reminding the reader of your hypothesis, and then will provide the results of your study, usually descriptive statistics followed by inferential statistics. You should save interpretation of these results for the next section.

Discussion:
This section relates your results to your hypotheses, considers how these correspond to findings in other research, and describes any limitations with your results. Here, you broaden your scope again to consider implications and suggest further research.  

NOTE: For a comprehensive checklist of elements to include, consult your Moodle page

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Further reading:

“Writing the Experimental Report: Overview, Introductions, and Literature Reviews.” Purdue Online Writing Lab. <https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/670/03/.>. Accessed September 7, 2016.

Trochim, William M. The Research Methods Knowledge Base, 2nd Edition. Internet WWW page, at URL: <http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/> (version current as of October 20, 2006).

It's important for your research question to be focused, clear, and relevant. Once you have a general topic, you can narrow it down by several factors:

• population: who is involved? who is being affected?
• setting: where is this occurring? are there multiple settings?
• phenomenon: what is happening? how is it described?
• consequences: what are the effects of this? on whom?

Mapping out your topic can help you conduct more efficient searches of the literature -- having a clearer sense of what you're looking for in advance will save you time and effort.

These articles report original research or studies, i.e. actual observations or experiments, rather than theoretical developments or methodological approaches. You can identify them in several ways:

• keywords: look for “study,” “empirical,” or mentions of participants, observations, methodology, or measurements
• structure: will usually include introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections
• publication: should be in an academic or professional journal, such as Journal of Psychology or JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, rather than in popular magazines or newspapers

The following databases consist of scholarly and professional titles that publish empirical research articles:

PsycINFO: 1887 to present, covers academic literature in psychology and related disciplines, including psychiatry, sociology, education, and other areas.

Search tip: On the Advanced Search page, you can scroll down to Methodology and select EMPIRICAL STUDY to narrow your search.

Search tip: You can add keywords to your search that are included in empirical studies, and can limit to scholarly journals.

Search tip: You can also narrow your search by using Subject Terms. Articles are tagged with these terms to indicate their primary subjects. To search by Subject Terms, you can click on the links listed in article records.

Or you can use the Thesaurus to look up Subject Terms and add them to your search. PsycINFO will also suggest Subject Terms if you toggle that option before searching. 

PubMed: 1966 to present, comprehensive biomedical index that includes psychology and related disciplines

In PubMed, subject terms are called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), and you can search for them similarly in an index.

Web of Science: 1984 to present, includes thousands of journals across the sciences and social sciences, and provides a cited reference search function.

Looking Backwards:
An additional strategy for finding relevant studies is reference mining -- looking at the cited references of a relevant article to find related works. This is moving back in time in relation to your article, into prior research.

Looking Forwards:
You can also use features like Cited By (Sociology Database, Sociological Abstracts, Google Scholar) and Cited Reference Search (Web of Science) to find works that have cited a particular article. This is moving forward in time in relation to your article, looking at more current research.

You can consult the print guide to APA style, in the Reference section of Frost and in the Science Library. You can also refer to APA style guidelines from the OWL at Purdue.

We also provide instruction and support for Zotero, a free tool that helps you collect, manage, and cite your sources. It's available in all computer labs on campus, and you can download it on your own computer for free.

If you'd like individual help with citation or research, you can visit the Reference Desk in Frost Library, or make an appointment to talk to a librarian.

Your liaison librarian is available to help with any aspect of the research process, including:

• developing your research question(s)
• crafting a search strategy and evaluating results
• organizing and citing your sources

For individual research consultations, you can visit the Reference Desk in Frost, or make an appointment to talk to a librarian (or email me directly: kdagan@amherst.edu).