How to Write Brilliant Psychology Essays. Paul Dickerson
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Locating your (re)sources
What do you need to find out in order to solve this essay?
Start by noting what you know – briefly jot down all the thoughts and ideas that you have regarding the essay title that you are working on.
Then identify what you need to find out – you might need further details, names and dates, specific bits of information, or it could be more generic, such as ‘information that I can use to critique the Multi-Store Model’.
Note where you can look to find this out – don’t just lazily list ‘on the web’, be precise. Is it in your lecture notes, a textbook or an item on the reading list?
Make use of your notes, textbook and other material that has been identified as being important on your course, and specifically for this topic and this essay. This is most likely to include key information – do make use of it.
Identify the potential challenges along the way – there are possibly things that might be difficult to find. Perhaps the hardest are those we are not yet aware of – perhaps there are excellent reviews of the evidence that we do not know of, which could be invaluable. Try to envisage what might exist as well as looking for the bare essentials of what you need.
Be careful as you enter your distraction zones! Yours might be as you search on the web, or look for your notes, or go to find a textbook. Be aware of where you are most likely to be distracted away from your goal and acknowledge the temptation, without giving in to it. Gamify it: give yourself 50 points, a cut-out and keep medal, or some other reward for running three Google searches without suddenly being caught by YouTube videos of a fish that can speak fluent Spanish. All those distractions will still be there later.
Identify what you could include that might make your essay shine. Would a meta-analysis relating to the issue be relevant? Perhaps there is a recent empirical or review paper, or a paper which details a different perspective on the issue? This can be especially valuable if the topic of your essay has a well-trodden debate (the nature–nurture debate being the most obvious example of this).
This active–engagement approach is so different from the 20 or so Google searches we might do each day, which can be unthinking, almost automatic responses, like scratching, simply performed to relieve the inconvenient sense of not knowing. Here we are being strategic: we are thinking and planning before searching. Doing it this way means that we approach sources proactively, strategically – that is, with a sense of how we might use them. Yes, they will suggest modifications to our plans, they will offer something that differs from what we expected, but we have approached them as mind meets mind – not mind meets photocopier. Adopting this proactive engagement approach is a massive step towards making whatever we find our own.
Finding relevant sources
We all probably develop a default preference for one or two databases. Like our preferred smartphone, we get used to the way it feels, how it works and we feel we are somehow in tune with it. However, this approach could be limiting us far more than we realise. If we visit the same café, order the same snack, drink the same drink, we are at least dimly aware of the alternatives – with databases we tend to almost forget that other options exist.
There are a couple of snags with giving advice of this nature to readers who are associated with different institutions. For one, my ESP is really rather limited, so I don’t know the provision at your university. The only compensation here is that you do, or at least you can do. The second is that even if I did have such incredible knowledge, I couldn’t keep up with your institution’s changing subscriptions, and if I did, this book would be so long and boring that it might become a major intervention for most forms of insomnia. Given these limitations, you need to become familiar with your institution’s online and hard-copy resources, and make use of your information professionals’ expertise in terms of identifying relevant information and accessing it. Here I will sketch out some key databases, but it is not a complete list (see also Table 2.4). The bespoke information concerning your specific institution will vary and it is really worth investing 45 or even 60 minutes of your life to find out about it. In the meantime, investing just a few minutes right here, right now could help you to avoid simply defaulting to whatever you are most familiar with.
Some recurring terms
Abstracts
Often your search will yield results that include abstracts of publications. These are typically summaries of around 200–300 words which provide the main details of the articles, chapters or books that you have come across to a search. Abstracts are super-helpful in working out how relevant the source might be to your essay, but beware of being sucked into paying for articles unless this has been highlighted as an expectation of your course. Your institution may well have free access to the source and, if not, the source may not be as relevant as it seems. Try to avoid staying with the abstract alone – an abstract provides insufficient information for all but the most passing citation within the body of your essay. An essay populated with information from abstracts will look a little vague and superficial. Usually if an article is worth citing, it is worth reading.
Abstracting and indexing databases
You will notice that some of these databases are primarily for identifying the articles that you want. These will typically provide full citation details (that is, all of the information identifying the article – author, title of article, book, journal or conference proceedings details, etc.) and will often include an abstract, if available. You may – partly depending on your institution’s subscription arrangements – be able to access the full text. While abstracting and indexing databases can lead to a two-stage article access process, they mainly help you to identify relevant material rather than necessarily to access it. They often utilise sophisticated and flexible search parameters, giving you a lot of freedom in terms of how you search. Abstracting and indexing databases often draw on a wider pool of journals and may be less limited to particular publishers or organisations than full-text databases.
Full-text databases
Some of the databases do include full-text access, offering you the opportunity not only to identify relevant articles but to access the full text (rather than just an abstract) of them as well. It is worth noting that full-text databases, while convenient, may draw on a narrower range of sources, and in some cases relying on just one full-text database could mean that important perspectives are underrepresented.
Peer-reviewed sources
This is often used as a benchmark of academic quality. When a journal states that it is ‘peer reviewed’, it refers to the fact that the articles which it publishes go through a process in which fellow experts (peers) read and review submissions to ensure the quality of all articles that are selected for publication in the journal. The databases listed in Table 2.4 focus on peer-reviewed journals, although more generic platforms, such as Google Scholar, will often include both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sources. With academic books, the review system is more varied and it can make sense initially to use texts which are recommended, or which are published by reputable publishers. These will be the sorts of publishers which typically pop up in your reading lists and which populate the reference lists of other publications.
Ace your assignment Search terms and search parameters
The importance of indexes in academic texts was mentioned earlier (see ‘i is for index’ above), but it is really important to use search terms and search parameters wisely to both identify your articles and to search within them. ‘Search terms’ include all of the specifying