PsycINFO Cited References Facts

October 2009 Update

Cited References Description

Since 2001, the records in PsycINFO have included cited references appearing in journal articles, books, and book chapters. Although comprehensive coverage of cited references began in 2001, references appear in some records for earlier years, and APA will continue to add retrospective coverage. As we do, we will list counts by year on this page.

Level of Coverage

APA attempts to include all references for each article or book; however, sometimes there are references that cannot be included. For example, a reference may not refer to an identifiable source:

Brown, 1997, p. 2
Emory, A., p. 4

These partial references are excluded.

Some journals mix end notes and bibliographic citations. If the journal does so on a regular basis, the references are not tagged for inclusion in cited references. If one or two end notes get slipped into what looks like a standard citation list, the end notes are removed from the list for the PsycINFO record. In this case, the number of "references" in the article might appear to be larger than the number listed in the PsycINFO record.

Some references are published in a language that is not expressed in Roman characters. At the present time, APA does not have the capacity to include those. As with the end notes, these references are omitted, and the number of references in the list will differ from the number in the article.

A few journals list references on every page of the article, rather than creating a reference list. These are not included in PsycINFO because they are too difficult to process. PsycINFO no longer accepts journals for coverage if they do not meet standards for journal publication. Journals that have been on the coverage list for some time are being reviewed to determine if PsycINFO should continue to index them.

Record Types With Cited References

Journal articles
Books
Chapters

Number of References

More than 38 million cited references in the PsycINFO database
Cited references included in more than 924,000 database records
Average number of cited references per record: 41

Format

APA style
Full journal titles whenever possible
96% of author names are last name and initials only

Publication Years With Cited References

Comprehensively starting 2001 (with the exceptions listed above)
Retrospectively for earlier years as available

Distribution by Publication Year