PSYC302 -- Personality Theories: Background Info

Articles chop up your topic into little, narrow questions. If you find 5 articles, each presenting a narrow study, it's often hard to see how they fit together and what question they are all trying to answer. But encyclopedias and handbooks

• Give you overviews of your topic
• Lead you to the important questions asked by researchers.
• Contain articles written by experts in their fields.
• Put your idea or question into a historical, research, or social context.
• Lead you to further references.

Annual Reviews have great overviews, long literature reviews, on general topics in psychology and clinical psychology.

• Find new topics.
• Get great references.
• See what the field is interested in.
• See where gaps are in the research.

Want to find overviews in personality? Here's my blog post on searching in Annual Reviews.