E-Reference Ratings: Psychology

Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works. Alexander

Having already earned a spot on Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles list in 2008, this unique database of actual therapy and counseling transcripts will be on desiderata lists of many academic libraries supporting well-developed psychology or psychiatry programs. Updated on a biweekly basis, the product indexes 240 full-text works dating from 1950 to 2009. Upon completion, users will have access to 2000 therapy transcripts, 40,000 pages of client narratives, and 25,000 pages of reference texts, which also include primary documents. Scope of the subjects, symptoms, and therapies covered is impressive though not equal across the board. As with most Alexander Street databases, the interface makes it easy to search and browse for information. Most full text is available in HTML format, though there are some documents that require Adobe Reader 8 or above.

Counseling and Therapy in Video. Alexander Street. alexanderstreet.com

An ideal supplementary resource for psychology students and professionals alike, this product provides streaming video with synchronized transcripts to more than 330 counseling and therapy sessions, professional consultations, demonstrations of therapeutic techniques, and interviews with and lectures by professional counselors and therapists courtesy of Microtraining Associates, Psychotherapy.net, and the University of Manchester's Department of Psychiatry. As with most Alexander Street products, the interface is intuitive and well organized. The advanced search feature provides a great deal of flexibility; one downfall, however, is that users cannot limit their searches by type of counseling session: actual, reenacted, or scripted. Videos range in length from 17 minutes to 150 minutes and stream at an acceptable rate of 400kbps to 800kbps, but the quality of even the newest videos is lacking. Both the annual subscription and the outright purchasing options are acceptably tiered to suit a variety of library atmospheres, especially those that already subscribe to Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts (above).

Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HPI). Ovid. www.ovid.com

Purely bibliographic in nature, this product indexes and abstracts over 145,000 citations to various publications from 1985 that administered measurement scales such as the Maslach Burnout Inventory or the Evaluation of Library Instruction Questionnaire. Although it is a powerful discovery tool allowing users to see the instruments that exist in their field, it still leaves much to be desired. Two big disappointments are the lack of access to the instruments themselves and no indication of whether copies of the instruments are available through the articles that cite them. Additionally, the search interface can be overwhelming; browsing, though possible, is not intuitive, and the product's cooperation with OpenURL resolvers still is not up to par. The good news is that HPI will not break the bank. However, those wanting some alternatives have at least two other options from the Buros Institute: Mental Measurements Yearbooks series, designed to assist professionals in selecting and using more than 4000 commercially available tests in categories such as personality, developmental, behavioral assessment, neuropsychological, and intelligence and aptitude, and Tests in Print, a bibliography of commercially available tests currently in print in the English language.

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection (PBSC). EBSCO. www.ebscohost.com

This would be a welcome addition to any institution as a stand-alone product, but it is probably better suited as a supplement to other psychology resources, particularly PsycINFO (below), for which it provides full-text access to more than 380 of the 2400 journals indexed. By itself, it offers users access to the indexing and full text of 566 journals, dating back to the 1940s and earlier and covering more specific areas of psychology, such as emotional and behavioral characteristics, mental processes, and observational and experimental methods. Usability is not a concern since PBSC is hosted on the EBSCO 2.0 platform, which offers flexibility in many forms, including a wide variety of limiters and expanders and a visual searching interface.

Psychology Collection. Gale Cengage. www.gale.cengage.com

Although smaller and less comprehensive than EBSCO's PBSC (above) and ProQuest's Psychology Journals (below), this product could stand on its own but would be best suited as a complement to either of the those two. Dating back to 1980, its coverage spans almost 30 years, with access to 447 journals, including Evidence Based Mental Health and Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. Of those titles indexed, 346 are peer reviewed, and 257 are available in full text. Users will also find references to multimedia, books, images, and case studies. The interface is well organized and showcases useful features like downloadable MP3 text-to-speech (TTS) files and integrated Web 2.0 tools like Delicious and Facebook. However, it is lacking basic functionality that even novice users would appreciate. For example, there is no option to revise a search except to start over; it functions better with Internet Explorer than Firefox; and it does not support OpenURL resolvers.

Psychology Journals. ProQuest. www.proquest.com

A pricey yet strong contender in the full-text psychology ring, Psychology Journals is a midsize product—smaller than EBSCO's PBSC (above) and larger than Gale's Psychology Collection (above)—that opens the door to more than 650 periodicals dating back to 1971; more than two-thirds of these are available in full text, including Academic Psychiatry, Constructivism in the Human Sciences, and Journal of Managerial Psychology. In addition to scholarly journals, users can search through newspapers, trade periodicals, and more than 4000 dissertations. Content not only focuses on core fields, such as developmental psychology and personality, but there is a commendable amount of attention given to related areas of study such as genetics, criminology, and business. ProQuest's very user-friendly interface takes the guesswork out of searching and browsing; it is compatible with link resolvers such as SFX and Serials Solutions.

PsycINDEX with TestFinder. Ovid. www.ovid.com

Though quite comprehensive—multimedia files go back to 1932, tests back to 1945, and research literature back to 1977—this database would probably be more appropriate for libraries in Germany or those serving a large German-speaking population of psychologists or psychology students than for most U.S.-based libraries. All records have English title translations and English subject headings, but only 30 percent have English abstracts. Like Ovid's other psychology product, HPI (above), PsycINDEX is bibliographic in nature, with no full-text access and running on a cumbersome yet powerful interface that can display in English, German, French, or Spanish. Pricing options, steep yet not outrageous, are limited to one or four concurrent users. Consider only if your research library supports master's and doctoral degrees in psychology.

PsycINFO. EBSCOhost. www.ebscohost.com

With almost 2400 journals dating back to the early 1800s and including a broad spectrum of psychological aspects across many fields—including business, education, law, medicine, and social work—PsycINFO is by far one of the most comprehensive, bibliographic psychological databases available. Libraries may want to consider purchasing supplemental products such as its sister database, PsycARTICLES (not reviewed here), or PBSC (above) to fill in some of the black hole that is the lack of full text. PsycINFO is great for students wanting to tap into historical psychological research and needing to find information about smaller niches not covered by other databases, but its usefulness is dependent on access to the aforementioned supplemental materials or well-developed interlibrary loan programs.