Identify the level (on the hierarchy of scientific evidence) of each of the three articles you found on that psychological science topi

Identify the level (on the hierarchy of scientific evidence) of each of the three articles you found on that psychological science topi

Written Assignment #4: How to find and read psychological science

DUE DATE: June 14, 2019 before 11:59 PM.

There are two parts to this assignment. Each part involves doing some searching for research online and reporting some characteristic of what you find. The written assignment for parts 1 and 2 should go on the same document.

Reading

1. To learn the process journal articles go through enroute to being published in the scholarly literature, read through Hartwright’s (2017) brief PowerPoint,“What Is a Journal Article?“

2. One way to find peer-reviewed psychological science journal articles is by using Google Scholar (rather than using PsychLit, PubMed, Web of Science, or other commercial data bases), read Harzing’s (2017) article for some reasons why, “Google Scholar Is a Serious Alternative to Web of Science.” You may have used some other search engine to find articles (like the databases above). If you’ve got a method that works for you, great. The nice thing about Google Scholar is that it’s free and is fairly comprehensive. In this class, I want you to use whatever works for you. If you don’t have an established method for article hunting, one goal for this assignment will be to establish one. In this exercise, we will use Google Scholar. If you’re more comfortable with your method, than use it. But I do recommend that you at least give Google Scholar a try, to see how you like it.

3. Watch this video: “How to Use Google Scholar.”

4. Now, let’s talk about journal paywalls. As you’ll see when you to try to access the actual articles (rather than just the titles and abstracts of articles), you’ll have to jump through a lot of hoops. Those hoops are due to journals’ paywalls.

a. If you weren’t a student or staff at a university, and therefore if you didn’t have access to a university’s library, you’d find that most of the “full texts” of journal articles (rather than just their titles and abstracts) were paywalled.

b. Paywalled means that the full text of the journal article is available to you only if you pay a fee to access each journal article (or if you have a paid subscription to the journal).

Part 1: How to find and read psychological science

c. To learn more about scholarly journal paywalls and the movement toward making journal articles open access rather than paywalled, read Mayyasi’s (2013) article, “Why Is Science Behind a Paywall?“

5. Finally, it’s time to practice. Think of two psychological science topics, each of which you will use as a search term on your search engine of choice.

a. It will be best if you use somewhat general (but not too general) topics. i. For example, “mother-child attachment,” “adolescent depression,”

“reading development,” “Big Five personality traits,” “change blindness,” “stereotype threat,” “effects of video games,” “treatment for eating disorders,” and “brain training” are broad enough.

ii. In contrast, “development” and “personality” are too broad, and “depression in 12-year-olds” is probably not broad enough.

b. For each of your two psychological science topics, use your search engine to find three journal articles, each of which is at a different level according to the Hierarchy of Scientific Evidence.

c. Go to this website to read descriptions of this hierarchy (this site is focused on clinical medical studies)

d. You will probably need to experiment with using quoted phrases (e.g., “mother-child attachment” AND “meta-analysis”) for your Google Scholar searches.

e. For each of these 6 articles (two topics x three levels of scientific evidence = 6 articles), you must find each article’s complete PDF (not simply the article’s Google Scholar entry or the article’s abstract on the publishers’ website).

WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Part 1 of your assignment is to create a new document in which you name and provide links to the papers you found.

For each of your two psychological science topics:

Identify the level (on the hierarchy of scientific evidence) of each of the three articles you found on that psychological science topic (remember that each of your three articles needs to be at a different level on the hierarchy of scientific evidence); and

Embed a link to each of the three articles’ [full-text] PDFs;

i. Be sure to link to the actual [full-text] PDF, not simply the article’s Google Scholar entry or only the abstract that appears on a journal publisher’s website.

ii. For this assignment, the [full-text] PDF can be behind a paywall;

however, the paywall must be one that our university library allows

users to cross over (when they are logged into the university’s network).

iii. In other words, the paywall cannot be one that prevents access to users of our university library

iv. Be sure to embed each of your three links using the hyperlinking technique you learned in assignment #2.

f. At this point, do not worry about using a citation style (e.g., APA citation style); we will focus on citation style later. Instead, each of your links should be the title of the article, in Title Case, and should look something like this: “Attachment Security: A Meta-Analysis of Maternal Mental Health Correlates.”

Here are two examples. The first one is correct; the second is incorrect.

Example #1: (this example is correct) Topic: The effect of exercise on depression Study: The Effect of Exercise on Depression, Anxiety and Other Mood States: A Review Type of study: Review

Example #2: (this example has a mistake in it. Clicking on the article name leads to an abstract but not the full article (which costs money to download). Make sure your hyperlinks lead directly to the full article (which you would be able to download if you were logged in to the York College intranet). Topic: The effect of exercise on depression Study: The Effect of Exercise on Depressive Symptoms in the Moderately Depressed Elderly. Type of study: Experiment

Save your document. You’ll be turning a single document containing both parts 1 and 2 (directions at end of this document).

Reading

a. One indicator of bad science reporting in the popular press is the lack of reliance on peer-reviewed studies. Therefore, when reading a popular press article, it’s important to find out if the popular press article is based on results reported in a scholarly article.

b. Good popular press articles indicate they’re based on results from a scholarly article by providing a link to those scholarly articles.

Part 2: How to find and read psychological science

1. For example, look at the first page of Kaplan’s (2013) popular press article “Most Depressing Brain Finding Ever” and the first page of Mooney’s (2013) popular press article, “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to do Math.”

2. Both of these two popular press articles link to the study on which they’re based with words such as “According to a new psychology paper, …” “The study, …” and “… research paper …”.

c. Other popular press articles link to the study’s scholarly article at the end of their popular press article.

1. For example, take alook at Fradera’s (2017) article, “How Much Are Readers Misled by Headlines that Imply Correlational Findings Are Causal?”

▪ Go to the last page of Fradera’s (2017) popular press article to see where the author links to the research study on which the popular press article is based.

▪ The link is given as “How Readers Understand Causal and Correlational Expressions Used in News Headlines.”

However, note that the link given to the scholarly article on which Fradera’s popular press article is based leads to only the journal article’s abstract. That’s because the scholarly article is not open access; it’s paywalled.

▪ If readers of the popular press article don’t have access to a university library, they won’t be able to read more than the abstract of the scholarly article, unless they’re willing to pay $11.95.

▪ Readers who won’t be able to read the entire scholarly article (unless they pay $11.95) include journalists who want to write popular press articles about that scholarly article.

WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Find five popular press articles on topics that interest you. For each article, you will

a. Name the title of the article, with an embedded hyperlink to the original source

b. Identify whether the popular press article is based on the results reported in a scholarly article.

c. If the popular press article is based on the results reported in a scholarly article, identify whether the popular press article links to that scholarly article. If yes, then find the article and hyperlink the work “yes” to it (as you did in part 1).

d. If the popular press article is based on a scholarly article and if the popular press article links to that scholarly article, identify whether the scholarly article is open access or paywalled.

For example:

1. Climate Change’s Looming Mental Health Crisis Based on results reported in a scholarly article? Yes Does popular press article link to the scholarly article? Yes Is the scholarly article open access? Yes If you wish, you can put your 5 papers in a table, like below:

Title Based on a scholarly article?

If yes, does the article contain a link to the original scholarly article?

Is the scholarly article open access?

1. Climate Change’s Looming Mental Health Crisis

Yes Yes Yes

2.

3.

4.

5.

Make sure to put Parts 1 and 2 on the same document (in word) and upload to “Writing Assignment #4: Find and Read Psych Science”