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Ever wonder what's in APA Databases?

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APA Databases Capture a Lifetime of Research

Fans of Isaac Asimov often point to his work's inclusion in nine of 10 major Dewey decimal classifications (and he should have been in the tenth, philosophy). Astonishingly, Asimov's writings span the spectrum of human knowledge. Although APA's databases don't claim to cover all subjects, they do cover far more than "just" psychology — they include the whole strutting stage of human behavior — covered through many academic sources in seven databases, each with its own focus.

There are some authors who, Asimov like, are so integral to the study of psychology that they can be found represented across our databases (e.g., Kazdin, Zimbardo, Bandura). Among that pantheon is Carol S. Dweck, whose work has bridged developmental psychology, social psychology, and personality psychology and who has examined the self-conceptions (or mindsets) people use to structure the self and guide their behavior.

Let us suppose you are a student interested in education. Few questions matter as much practically as what actually works to encourage young people to achieve their best potential, and Dweck's research is directly applicable to reaching that goal. What can we learn by looking for her work across databases?

Using the author lookup, I found four likely variations of Dweck's name in publications and added them to my search. A search at this point shows 157 results in all databases except for our streaming video database PsycTHERAPY. A quick glance at the facets for that set of results tells you a great deal about her work.

The most frequently appearing index term in her research is "motivation"; the author affiliations are topped by Stanford (where Dweck is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology), Columbia, University of Illinois, and Harvard. She has had 21 articles published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and you can see that the bulk of her research has been with young people under the age of 17.

Dig a little deeper by looking at the citations to the individual results, and you'll see that she is heavily cited in the PsycINFO database, often with hundreds citing her work and in a few cases with thousands citing her. Thus, objective evidence indicates that she is an exceptionally authoritative author on the issues of children and motivation.

Let's take a slightly closer look at each of the databases.

In PsycTESTS, Dweck is one of the authors of the Math Sense of Belonging Scale (2012), which measures students' perceptions of their math environment and the idea that women have less innate ability than men in math. "Sense of belonging to math," and the message that success in math is an acquired rather than an innate trait, was found to protect women from negative stereotypes. Sense of belonging increased their likelihood of pursuing math in the future. The test is 30-items and measures how comfortable the student is in a math setting.

For PsycCRITIQUES, let's dip into the past, to 1989, when Dweck was teaching at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She had begun her work in motivation, and thus she was a logical person to review a work like the Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior (Sorrentino & Higgens, 1986). She summarized the work at that time as cutting edge: "It is unique as a handbook in that, rather than summarizing an existing body of knowledge, it attempts to define and shape an emerging field." Her field, as it happened.

Her authored entries in PsycEXTRA are a series of 11 conference presentations and abstracts that begin in 2002, when she was teaching at Columbia, and end with an abstract from the most recent APA convention. They show her research exploration of how and why young people act as they do in addition to ways mindsets and stereotypes may limit them.

In PsycBOOKS, Dweck contributed a chapter in the APA book Why Aren't More Women in Science?: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence. Her chapter, "Is Math a Gift? Beliefs That Put Females at Risk," (Ceci & Williams, 2007) explored a fascinating difference between high-IQ girls and high-IQ boys in the 5th grade. When confusion was introduced, the boys did much better than the girls, demonstrating not a difference in ability "but a difference in how students cope with experiences that may call their ability into question — whether they feel challenged by them or demoralized by them."

The 33 articles Dweck has published that appear in PsycARTICLES provide an in-depth look at her research. In addition to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, her research has also appeared in Developmental Psychology, American Psychologist, and Psychological Review. One article, A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality, presented a research-based model of adaptive and maladaptive behavior that has been cited almost 2,200 (!) times.

Finally, to get the full sweep of Dweck's work, PsycINFO brings together a bibliographic record of her work, from a student at Yale in 1970 and her dissertation abstract in November 1972 to a publication last month in Basic and Applied Social Psychology. Almost 45 years of scholarship and counting.

Though few authors can match the overall corpus of work of Carol Dweck, many concentrate on the same major issues throughout their careers. The continuity of indexing and coverage provided in PsycINFO and APA's other research databases make it easy to find relevant authors and their work.

Here are permalinks that let you replicate this search:

• APA PsycNET
• EBSCO
• OvidSP
• ProQuest

APA Database Synergy: Recent Help for an Expert Witness

APA's research databases can work together to provide you with a suite of information about a topic.

For example, consider a young psychology professor asked to testify as a defense expert witness on the fallibility of eyewitness identification in a sexual assault case. Although she has a doctorate in psychology and law and is confident of her command of the research, she is new to court testimony and would like practical advice on the behavior of decision makers and successful courtroom testimony. She has an APA PsycNET Gold individual subscription, and so has access to APA's core databases. She has little lead time, and so she needs information she knows is authoritative and she needs it quickly.

An index term search for "expert testimony" and "witnesses" limited to full text published in the past year yields 11 results across databases.

Knowing that PsycCRITIQUES is the place to turn for peer reviews of current works, she looks there first for guidance. Pay dirt! She finds a review of Testifying in Court: Guidelines and Maxims for the Expert Witness (2nd ed.; Brodsky, 2013) that is specifically on point. The reviewer, cognitive psychologist Curt Carlson, is a professor at Texas A&M University whose primary research area is recognition memory and decision making involved in eyewitness identification.

Carlson's review of Testifying in Court describes it as "a practical guide, a kind of do-it-yourself pamphlet on expert courtroom testimony." Our novice expert is pleased to note that there are chapters specifically on eyewitness testimony and how to deal with intimidation from cross-examining attorneys, and Carlson reviewed a couple of the expert witness techniques used in the book and attests to their usefulness from his own experience. He also noted some aspects of the book he found problematic, most notably the alphabetical ordering of chapters.

Overall, the recommendation is positive enough that our novice witness wants to read it, and read it as soon as possible. This is an APA-published work. Though it was published in 2013, within the past year, it is no longer under embargo, and PDFs of all chapters are available in her PsycBOOKS subscription. By going to the Book record in PsycBOOKS, she can access the Table of Contents of the book, review the abstract for each chapter, and go directly to any content she needs.

Among the many chapters that will be right on point for her are the following:

• Transformative Moments
• Vigorous Cross-Examinations and Vigorous Answers
• The Well-Dressed Witness
• Your Expertise Used Against You

To replicate the search, limit to full-text databases, PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycCRITIQUES, and PsycEXTRA, search for "expert testimony" and "witnesses" as index terms, and restrict the search to the past year.