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Psychology Subject Pool: Alternative Written Assignment

A short guide to finding articles for the Psych Subject Pool AWA (Alternative Written Assignment).

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Vitalina Nova
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Subject Pool Alternative Written Assignment

Find a research article published in the last 6 months from a journal published by the American Psychological Association.

You will write a summary of the research article, including:

  • the method used
  • the results
  • and the implications of the research findings.  

Using PsycARTICLES to find your article

PsycARTICLES contains the full text of every issue of each of the acceptable APA journals -- plus, about 60 other high-quality psychology journals.

To find an article for your review, follow these steps:

1. Click this link to go to PsycARTICLES. This link pre-limits your search to empirical study articles from APA journals. The study population group has also been limited to Humans.

2. You will see a list of over 60,000 empirical study articles.  To limit to articles on a topic of interest, type some search terms into the top box.  Be brief - just one word or phrase, or one word or phrase on each line.

For example: 

3. Click Search.  You will be brought to a list of articles matching your criteria.

4. Now, set the date parameters to limit to articles published within the last six months:

Look at the left-hand menu on the results page for options to "Refine Results." Under "Limit to..." you can focus your results set to the desired dates. Note that by clicking the "Show More" link under the date slider, you can bring up a window with more search options, including the ability to limit the published date at the month and year level.

5.  Look through the resulting articles and select one to review for your paper.  Make sure to confirm that it was published within the last six months!!

If you have any trouble, go back and try different search terms, or add search terms to the empty search boxes to focus the results list.

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