Collins Memorial Library: CONN 202: The Psychedelic Renaissance: Academic Sources

In many assignments in college courses, your assignment may ask you to explore the scholarly conversation around your topic. If you are working in one discipline, you often will use the subject database(s) specific to that discipline to discover the scholarly conversation. For example, in a psychology course, you most likely will search PsycInfo, the database that indexes scholarly, peer-reviewed publications in psychology.

In multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary research, however, you'll need to explore multiple databases to discover which academic fields are discussing your topic. Moreover, different disciplines may approach a topic using different vocabularies, so you'll need to adjust your search terms. For example, a psychologist (PsycInfo) or a medical researcher (Medline/PubMed) might use "psilocybin" as a specific search term, while a scholar in philosophy (Philosopher's Index) or religion (ATLA Religion) would be more likely to use a more general term like "hallucinogenic drugs" or "entheogen."

Disciplinary Databases for Research into the Psychedelic Renaissance

The two disciplinary databases that will help you find scholarly literature for the most current scientific and behavioral research are MedLine (a subset of PubMed) and PsycInfo. The additional subject databases will help you find historical context, commentary, and disciplinary insights from other fields.

Anthropology Plus
Indexes material in the areas of social, cultural, physical, biological and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture and interdisciplinary studies.
ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials
Combines the premier index to journal articles, book reviews, and collections of essays in all fields of religion with ATLA's online collection of major religion and theology journals.
History of Science, Technology and Medicine (HSTM)
An international bibliography for the history of science, technology, and medicine and their influence on culture, from pre-history to the present. Includes records of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, dissertations, serials, maps and other materials.
MEDLINE (EBSCO)
Provides authoritative information on medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences, and much more. Created by the National Library of Medicine, MEDLINE uses MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) indexing with tree, tree hierarchy, subheadings and explosion capabilities to search citations from current biomedical journals.
Philosophers Index
Covers scholarly research in all major fields of philosophy. It contains research published since 1940 including journals from many countries with content representing a variety of languages.
PsycINFO
The American Psychological Association's (APA) resource for abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books and dissertations is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health.

Disciplinary Databases for Research into the Arts & Humanities

These subject databases will help you explore the arts as they intersect with or react to the psychedelic renaissance.

Art Full Text
Offers full text plus abstracts and indexing of an international array of peer-selected publications, including coverage of Latin American, Canadian, Asian and other non-Western art, new artists, contemporary art, exhibition reviews, and feminist criticism.
Arts & Humanities Database
Features hundreds of titles covering Art, Architecture, Design, History, Philosophy, Music, Literature, Theatre and Cultural Studies.
Film & Television Literature Index
An index to film and television literature.
MLA International Bibliography
The key database for identifying scholarly books, essays, articles, and dissertations on modern literature in all languages. Also covers cultural studies, folklore, film studies, and linguistics.
Music Periodicals Database
Provides indexing, abstracts and full-text, for international music periodicals. Content covers the full spectrum of subjects and all aspects of music, including music education, performance, ethnomusicology, musical theatre, theory, popular music forms and composition.

General Database Search Tips

Try these strategies to become a better, more efficient searcher:

Build your search vocabulary -- keep a running list of key words, phrases, concepts, synonyms, and any related terms or ideas that you find.
Use advanced search features -- narrow your search with "AND," expand your search with "OR," or search in specified fields (i.e., author, title, publication, abstract).
Use search limits -- control the types of results you get (academic journals? language?) and how they are displayed (date? relevance?) to hone in on relevant resources.
Try multiple searches and evaluate your results -- try to figure out why you got the results you did, and adjust your search until you get closer to results that match your needs.
Use database descriptors -- once you find an article that looks good, see what descriptors or "subject headings" were assigned to it in the database. You can use these to search only for articles that have the same descriptors attached.