Psychology and Psychiatry Serials

Book excerpt: This valuable new bibliography fills a void in the reference literature of psychology and psychiatry by providing a guide to the major English-language periodicals in these fields. Designed to be a flexible collection development tool, this practical volume will facilitate librarians’decision making as they select and deselect serials according to the particular needs and interests of their patrons. Psychology and Psychiatry Serials consists of 305 titles, including some annuals, arranged alphabetically. The general topic areas include psychometrics, experimental psychology, developmental psychology, personality, physical and psychological disorders, treatment and prevention, educational psychology, applied psychology, and general psychology. The journals were selected from those indexed in such sources as Psychological Abstracts and Current Index to Journals in Education and were reviewed on the basis of subject relevance, importance within subject area, attention to current professional issues, level of scholarship, and inclusion in major indexing and abstracting tools. The citation for each publication consists of the current title, date of publication of first volume (under the current title), frequency of publication, publisher, ISSN, indexing and abstracting tools in which the publication is listed, and a brief annotation. Each entry also includes one or more “subject codes” that correspond to the 16 areas used for classification of Psychological Abstracts entries. An index following the entries lists titles by subject area and list of publishers’addresses is included to facilitate the request of sample issues and queries about the subscription process. Created by professional librarians with years of experience in these subject areas, Psychology and Psychiatry Serials has innumerable practical and theoretical applications for librarians: the bibliography can be used in the technical services fields where serials control, acquisitions, and cataloging demand greater precision in the description of published materials the entries for publication histories and publication frequency can furnish authoritative data for bibliographic descriptions the annotations and subject category codes will be useful starting points for subject analysis the convenience of the bibliography makes characteristics of serial literature studies relatively easy to do since it reduces the amount of work an investigator needs to do to gather primary data about serials in terms of evaluating indexing and abstracting services of core materials, the list has great potential for duplication and overlap studies with a core publication format, the list can be used to quickly compare index counts in psychology and behavioral sciences as a whole, and in particular subjects the list can also be used as a companion to existing lists, some of which are more comprehensive and exhaustive