The American Psychological Association, though PsychInfo, has long published Psychological Abstracts, a collection of citations, abstracts, and keywords given by articles in journals, chapters in books, and dissertations. This collection makes it easy for researchers to sort through previous findings.
However, considerable scientific information is never published in journals, books, or disserations. Instead, the information is presented at scientific meetings, published in association newsletters, or published as government reports.
PsychInfo has a new abstracting service, PsychExtra, that will cover information outlets not collected by PsychAbstracts. It sometimes has full text. They have allowed users of WPE to access PsychExtra until October 1, 2004. The description of coverage can be found on the site. Please note that their search engine uses * for a truncation character and a single quote ' for exact phrase.
PsychExtra's description of itself:
PsycEXTRA, a companion to the scholarly PsycINFO database, supplies clinicians, information professionals, policy-makers, researchers, and consumers with a wide variety of credible information in psychology, behavioral science, and health. Most of the coverage is material written for professionals and disseminated outside of peer-reviewed journals. Documents include newsletters, magazines, newspapers, technical and annual reports, government reports, consumer brochures, and more. PsycEXTRA is different from PsycINFO in its coverage, and also in its format, because it includes abstracts and citations plus full text for a major portion of the records. There is no overlap with PsycINFO.