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PSYC 252: Clinical Psychology: Epistemic Exclusion Activity

Exit Ticket Activties

For your exit ticket in GLOW, you will be asked to go through a few exercises and reflect on a number of different questions related to publishing and psychology research. Below are some tools to help you get started, as well as some tips to help guide you through the activities.

Part 1: Refining Your Search

Conduct a search in PsycInfo using an aspect of the memoir author's identity AND another psychological factor.

What was your search query and number of results?

How hard or easy was it to yield a decent number of results? What did you learn during the process of reining your search query?

Memoir Author Identity Terms

  • Black women or African American women
  • Muslim Americans or Muslim Women
  • Iranian-American or Persian-American
  • Asian American
  • People of Color
  • Systemic Racism

Psychological Terms

  • Schizophrenia
  • Bipolar Disorder (I or II)
  • Mania
  • Major Depression or Clinical Depression

Part 2: Researching Journals

Look at the journals publishing the first 5-10 articles in your results page. Do a little digging about the scope and subject matter for each one.

What do you notice about the journals publishing these articles? Do they appear to be mainstream or more specialized? What does this tell you about the research field?

Mainstream and Specialized Journals

What do I mean by a mainstream vs. specialized journal? Mainstream journals deal exclusively with a particular subfield of psychology research, or psychology research as a whole, while a more specialized journal may choose to pinpoint one demographic, or issue to publish on. The point of this exercise is not to easily place a journal in either category, because you often can't, but to consider what the subject scope of the journal is, and consequently, who may or may not regularly read the journal.

  • Does the title indicate a specific demographic or psychological issue? If so, then it is probably a more specialized journal
  • Does the title indicate a scope outside of typical psychological research, such as sociology? It may not be strictly a psychology journal.
  • Does the journal welcome submissions from a variety of fields, not just psychology? It may be more specialized in a specific cross-disciplinary issue.

Part 3: Compare Your Findings

Use the same search query in another database.

What do you notice about the results? Are they similar or different to the results you got in PsycInfo? Why or why not?

Database for Comparison