Resources for psychology students

Many university subjects require and expect you to be up-to-date on current research which can be difficult if you don't know where to look. Books can be fantastic starting points for getting a bit of general knowledge and finding the foundations of a theory, but almost as soon as books are published they become outdated. For that reason, I don't often turn to books when writing reports - my first step is always to check online databases like ebsco, sciencedirect and Google Scholar.

Following that, I have a few other tricks up my sleeve:

• It's helpful to follow certain twitter accounts which post links to research that might be relevant to you - if not, it's still a handy way of easily staying up-to-date on research. The ones I follow are:

@BPSOfficial

@ResearchDigest

@PsychoBest

• Apps like iTunes U, EBSCOhost and Psychology Latest are handy for finding research on the go, and EasyBib is great for sorting out your references.

• Simply Psychology offers some really useful articles about some of the fundamental theories in psychology and also contains information about influential psychologists.

• The Psychologist magazine is probably one of my favourite resources and the easiest way to stay up-to-date on psychological news. I can't tell you how many times I've found something relevant and useful to a university module just by skimming through it - you can also find certain articles in their online archives, but you do have to be a BPS member to view full posts.

• My final resource is Critical Thinking for Psychology which outlines ways to write and think in a more critical manner. I probably should have read this before I started university but I still found it useful, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking to brush up on their report writing skills.

Hope this helps!