Psychology  Tags: psychology library psych  

One way to find ideas for psychology topics is to see what has already been written. Psychological research is first reported by researchers in academic journals and books. Most research is published and only a few people ever learn about it.

Sometimes, the research strikes reporters as having something interesting about it for a more general audience and it will get written about in magazines, newspapers, and blogs.

Academic journals, also called scholarly journals and peer-reviewed journals, are the sources of articles you should use to support your writing.

But, magazines, newspapers, and blogs are also useful for finding topics, reading about them from interesting, engaging writers (academic writers almost never are because they want to appear serious to other academicians) and seeing what research is getting attention.

Let's start with sources for general audiences for finding topics.

For articles about psychology topics, it finds articles in these publications that are generally pretty interesting and readable without too much effort: Scientific American and Scientific American Mind articles (or the Scientific American web site), Psychology Today articles (or the Psychology Today web site), and Current Directions in Psychological Science.

The New York Times Health Research is a good place to look for ideas and names of researchers, particularly under the Mind and the Behavior sections.

Shankar Vedantam's column Department of Human Behavior in the Washington Post is also a good source of interesting research.

Academic Search Premier is a database that searches for articles from academic journals, magazines, and newspapers across all academic disciplines.  This includes, for example, Psychology Today.

Psychology encyclopedias, such as the ones from Sage, handbooks of psychologicial research and practice (this link is a search of the library catalog), and the Annual Reviews Online for Psychology are good places to look for ideas based on what has already been researched.