Pop Psychology Assignment

Following a tutorial assignment on “Pop Psychology” in which I chose the topic; Autism- Its Influence on Development and Behaviour, I decided to use this exciting area of research in tandem for both assignments. While conducting a literature search for my tutorial, I documented the process and used the information and experience gathered as the basis for this assignment. The fact that I was given a brief by my TA and had to choose a topic within “Pop Psychology” myself, meant that the various databases I used proved to be vital when gathering preliminary information.

Following the brief provided, I first began to conduct basic searches online. I learned in our RSaM computer labs that the best and most efficient way to access scientific journals

It was therefore more difficult to navigate. For example, the “Advanced Search” option is not so apparent but having been informed of its location in Labs, I began my literature search. This advanced option is excellent as it allows one to enter various key words as well as altering the search field. This means that one can filter the data by Title, Author, Date of Publication etc. For my initial search, I wanted to keep it quite broad. I entered “Autism Spectrum Disorders” in the main search tab, omitting any words in the “And/OR” tabs. I selected the search field as “TX- All Text”, again to keep the search broad. This selection provided me with over 10,312 results. Such findings were quite overwhelming. This made me realize that I would have to narrow down my search further. I organized the articles based on Relevance and also experimented with the “Source Types” tab on the left hand side of the page, selecting Academic Journals. I then selected my first article, Article 1. I loved the search results layout out. One can clearly see the Authors, Source, Methodology and Date of Publication as well as the abstract. The keywords are also bolded which verified the validity of the

The search field remained unchanged as I didn’t want to limit the findings too much. I preferred this option as it greatly narrowed down the search to 3,971 articles. I selected Article 2 and Article 3 from such results. Again, I was very impressed with the coherent way in which the results were displayed, particularly the summary of my search history. This meant that it would be extremely easy to access previous findings, an option that would prove useful when carrying out research. I added “Development” as my “OR” word, but this increased the findings to 748,616, which not helpful at all. Nonetheless, it is evident that the “AND/OR” tab is an excellent asset to PI . Overall, I found that PI was a superb catalogue having outlined the positives above. However, one negative was that the broad search was not detailed enough and the “Advanced Search” is vital to carry out a search properly. One may not realize its importance, as it is not made apparent on the home page of the