Psychology Research

Media reports and finding research in the news

Media Reports and Research Articles

Many times you will find references to interesting psychology topics in newspapers, popular magazines and on the television news shows or in documentaries and other types of film or video.

The question for students then becomes, how do I go about finding empirical research on a particular topic of interest to me, when all I have are some mentions in a media report that usually do not include a full citation of the article.

Sometimes it is easy to track down the actual research article being cited in the report.

For example, this NY Times article "Hurricane Stress Linked to Stillbirths" has a link to the empirical study referenced. The hyperlinked phrase -- Writing in The Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health -- takes you to this freely accessible journal article:

You can then use the article and the list of references to gather together some research articles on the topic. You can also use those articles to put together a list of key words for searching in the library's databases.

For example, the conclusion from the abstract states:

"The destruction caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita imposed significant measurable losses in terms of fetal death. Post-disaster migratory dynamics suggest that the reported effects of maternal exposure to hurricane destruction on fetal death may be conservative."

Some key words you may want to use in your searching are:

• natural disaster

and

• fetal death

Another example is the following blog article by Elizabeth Landau, CNN.com Health Writer/Producer: Bullying's mental health toll may last years

This one does not name the study, nor does it provide a link to the research article.

However, by selecting key pieces of information, you will have enough terms to use the library databases -- PsycINFO, SocINDEX w/fulltext or PubMed -- to search for and find the article referenced. If you know the title of the journal in which the study was published, you can use the library's Journal Finder to determine where to access the particular journal and search for the article there.

See these phrases:

• A new study in the journal Pediatrics

• lead author Laura Bogart

• The children and their parents responded

• article title bullying, mental health toll

• total of 4,297 students and their parents

• children and parents were interviewed in 5th, 7th and 10th grades

Using Journal Finder, you can see where to access full text of articles in the journal Pediatrics and, since it is a post from Feb 17, 2014, you can be pretty sure this is the gateway to use: American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 01/01/1948 - present

Once you enter the journal web page, you can search within the journal by using the author's name and key word bullying. Looking at the results, you want to look for the author's name and then some of the key words from above to help you narrow down the results to find the exact article you are looking for: