Links - Research resources

Where to go for extended investigation of questions

Special note: Resources preceded by "‡"are considered especially useful for site visitors who are not mental health professionals. This website section is in its early stages of development. It will grow considerably in the future

Introduction: Visitors to this website likely will not get all their questions answers using simply what's at the website. When you need to go beyond that material, here are some excellent places to go...

General Reference

Book full text search, reading, and download

• ‡  Amazon.com's - book text search and reading functionality - Use this for accessing books still in copyright. One can locate books containing terms or phrases of interest, and do limited reading within them. Useful for quick verification of the value of a particular title. Book Tables of Contents can usually be accessed as well, for further verification.
• ‡ Google full text book search - Google's busy creating electronic copies of out-of-copyright books and putting them online. They are digitizing the collections of several large university and governmental libraries. You can download a PDF copy of a book of interest, for your own Library, as well as search and read copies online. This is fast becoming a very major resource, especially for anything of an historical nature.

Journals, serial publications search

• ‡ Google Scholar - "...a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature... peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories...."
• PubMed (U.S. National Library of Medicine) - Marvelous online database accessing "...over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources."

Epidemiology

• Mental Health Statistics (Center for Mental Health Services, SAMSHA) - "CMHS operates the only program in the Nation that focuses on the development of data standards that provide the basis for uniform, comparable, high-quality statistics on mental health services."
• ‡ The Numbers Count: Mental Disorders in America - "A fact sheet describing the prevalence of mental disorders in America. 2006 (rev.)" (NIMH),

Dictionaries

• ‡ Google's "define" functionality - Into a Google search text box insert define {term}.

  Example: "define browser" produces a page of links to definitions at various websites. Usually, this page begins with a definition excerpted from a site. I use this functionality relatively often, and definitely more often than I use any particular dictionary site. It's good for all sorts of terms.

Encyclopedias

• ‡ Encyclopedia of Psychology - An ongoing project of the Department of Psychology, Jacksonville State University (Jacksonville, Alabama, USA), this is a "portal" to many other sites.
• ‡ Wikipedia.org - Especially for scientific and technical topics, but also for most others as well, this is a superb resource. The coverage is dazzling, and the format of the articles is usually well thought out. Often the depth of information offered far exceeds one's expectations, experience with encyclopedias, or needs - but article access tools make this a non-problem. I use this resource often, and generally I'm quite satisfied with the results. For quick answers, as well as serious efforts to learn more about a subject, it's virtually unbeatable.

Internet Directories

A good alternative to a brute force search (such as Google or Yahoo or MSN Search can do) is the human-assembled Internet Directory. Note that browsing has certain advantage over targeted searching - the two approaches tend to produce different results, and both work well.

• ‡ Open Directory Project - "...the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors." It provides core information to all the major search services. You can even download a copy of the index for use off-line!
• ‡ Google Directory - "The web organized by topic into categories."
• ‡ Yahoo Directory - One of the oldest web directories.

Language translation

Generally, all one needs to obtain a translation of a web page from one major language to another is the URL (web address) of the page and the URL of the translation service page. Bear in mind that computer translation from one language to another usually produces at least some unclear or even nonsensical results on any given page. Still, it can be considerable better than having no access to the page at all.

• ‡  Google's Language tools service - Offers several ways to obtain a translation.
• ‡ Yahoo Babel Fish - Similar to Google's offering. Simpler access page.