Psychology 101 Do-Over

It seemed a simple enough task: find scholarly journal articles on color and psychology, but I found out otherwise yesterday when introducing the Psychology 101 class to our subscription journal databases.

During the class, the most relevant result set was found using the Wilson OmniFile database and searching on the subject heading 'Color / Psychological Aspects'; the subject heading was suggested by the database after an initial search on the keywords 'color and psychology'.

Afterward, I was left feeling dissatisfied with the results and wondered how I could have done things better.

Long story short - I found the most relevant full-text articles using Academic Search Premier.
'What's that?' you ask. Academic Search Premier is not currently one of the AiRD Library's subscription databases, and so I did not demo it in yesterday's class. This database is, however, available through NC Live. Please see my blog post on NC Live for more information on this great resource available to all North Carolina residents and students.

As with Wilson OmniFile, I started out with a search on 'color and psychology', found many irrelevant items, was pointed to the subject heading 'color --psychological aspects' and my search results improved considerably.

One surprising finding was how well Google Scholar fared compared to the subscription products.
Google Scholar is Google's attempt to cover academic literature in both books and journals; the content tends to be dominated by biomedical literature. Occasionally there are links to full-text resources which are indicated by a green arrow, but most results are just citations.

As an alternative to searching on keywords or subject headings, I also conducted author name searches relating the subject of an earlier blog post: 'Ravi Mehta' and 'Markus Maier'. While Ravi Mehta's article published in the journal Science was cited in ProQuest, the full text was not available for that particular article (too recent, ProQuest covers Science from 1988 to 1995; Academic Search Premier also did not have the full text of this article). On Google Scholar
I was unable to find Ravi Mehta's article (either a citation or the full-text), but a search on Markus Maier retrieved a number of results, two of which linked to full-text articles. Google Scholar also has 'find similar articles' and citation searching features.

Of course, this is just one topic. The databases all have their strong and weak points; ProQuest, for example, produced the most results on a search on 'movitation and employees' (limited to peer-reviewed, full-text articles) because of its emphasis on business and management publications.

[Update 09/21/2009: After extensive evaluation based on numerous searches, in my judgment the Ai ProQuest bundle provides more comprehensive full-text content than either Academic Search Premier or Complete. The test searches included another search on a psychology topic, post traumatic stress disorder. Note that in addition to articles in magazines and scholarly journals, ProQuest also provides access to full-text dissertations (Academic Search does not).]

Correction regarding WilsonLink
During the demo I described the WilsonLink feature as a permanent url linking to the article; it isn't. The WilsonLink feature allows you to click on links to try to find the full-text of the article in question in other databases (to which we may or may not have subscription access); this is useful if only the citation to the article is provided within Wilson OmniFile. The persistent urls are given lower down on the Record View page.