WASHINGTON — The American Psychological Association today indexed its 4 millionth record in its PsycINFO® database of scholarly psychology literature.
This achievement is the result of over eight decades of detailed abstracting and indexing of international literature in the field of psychology and its related disciplines. Since reaching 3 million records in 2010, more than 200 new journals and more than 10,000 new books have been added to the PsycINFO database, bringing overall journal coverage to more than 2,570 journals. All of these changes have been necessary to cover the expanding and increasingly interdisciplinary literature of interest to psychologists around the world.
“This achievement is a testament to APA’s commitment to expanding the depth and breadth of PsycINFO coverage of the scholarly literature in psychology,” said Gary R. VandenBos, PhD, APA publisher. “PsycINFO’s coverage now extends from the 1892 founding of the field of psychology as a separate discipline to the diverse array of research topics explored by modern-day psychologists across health, education, human factors, mental health, neuroscience, social processes and many other areas of investigation.”
The 4 millionth entry indexed was “The Effect of Unpredictable Early Childhood Environments on Parenting in Adulthood” by Ohad Szepsenwol, Jeffry A. Simpson, Vladas Griskevicius and K. Lee Raby, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 109(6), Dec. 2015.
From its beginnings in 1927 as Psychological Abstracts®, PsycINFO has been — and continues to be — an unparalleled resource for psychological and behavioral research throughout scholarly and professional fields. The coverage of abstracts from books, journals and dissertations from the 16th century to the present provides a comprehensive look at the evolution of psychology over time; expanded coverage also includes grants and sponsorships, tests and measures, supplemental materials, publication history, as well as over 82 million cited references within the database. PsycINFO continues to keep researchers up to speed with the indexing of the “first posting” of journal articles — allowing for access to the earliest publication of peer-reviewed research.
“The achievement of 4 million records is attributed to an amazing network of content management efforts: staff expertise, the most comprehensive taxonomy in the behavioral sciences and production system innovations,” said Brenda Evans, PsycINFO’s bibliographic production manager. “There have also been changes in publishers’ practices that facilitated our growth, such as the provision of material in electronic formats and the early postings of journal articles.”
PsycINFO records represent discrete scholarly units, such as journal articles, books and book chapters, in highly structured formats that facilitate both search and retrieval. This enriched record includes extensive publication and author data, an abstract describing the research, as well as data fields allowing refinement of search and retrieval from multiple points, including classification, natural language keywords, controlled vocabulary and check tags. Records also include references cited in the literature covered.
PsycINFO, which began in 1967, reached 1 million records in 1995, 2 million in 2004 and 3 million in 2010. The database contains all of the records from Psychological Abstracts, as well as extensive back files of many digitized psychology journals.
The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes more than 122,500 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.