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History of Psychology

The best information I could find on this topic is incorporated into Chapter 01 (Psychology as a Science) in my online introductory textbook, Psychology: An Introduction, 2017-2018 edition. Part Two of the chapter is a brief history of psychology.

This page replaces the original on the "scholarly resources on the web" link collection on Psych Web. Link collections were useful in the mid-1990s when I created this section, but now there are better ways to find scholarly information. Google Scholar is especially useful.

If you are a beginning student, do not be intimidated by Google Scholar; it is easy to use. Default search results will be most-cited articles of all time for that topic, and that will include all the classic old-timers. (Don't forget to use quotation marks around search phrases, for better results.)

For more recent articles, restrict your results to the last few years, using the Google Scholar options on the left of the page. This will yield results entirely different from the default search, because recent articles are not yet cited as often as the older ones.

Often the link in Google Scholar will take you to an abstract (a summary of an article) but the full article will be behind a paywall. You might be able to find a free version of the whole article by going back to a regular Google search (outside Google Scholar) and using the modifier pdf: in front of your key words.

So, for example, a search inside regular Google for [pdf:"eyewitness testimony"] without the square brackets will return pdf documents relevant to the phrase "eyewitness testimony." Many will be full articles. There is also a handy Chrome extension called Unpaywall that will automatically locate full versions of articles that are behind paywalls.

Happy searching and good luck.


Write to Dr. Dewey at psywww@gmail.com.

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