About APA Publications and Databases (2024)

Jasper Simons
Executive Publisher

The Office of Publications and Databases is a major division of the American Psychological Association. One of the primary objectives when psychologists established APA in 1892 was the exchange of scientific information. Its annual meeting was the first component of knowledge dissemination; later, in 1927, the association added journals, an abstract periodical, then books, and finally databases.

Today, Publications and Databases offers content in both print and electronic form.

APA Journals produces an array of scholarly journals that cover the spectrum of modern psychology. The oldest journal published by APA is published under its original name, Psychological Review^®, which began in 1894.

APA's rigorous attention to peer review and the presentation of scholarly and technical information has resulted in high quality journals sought by professionals in many disciplines. Increasingly, smaller societies turn to APA to publish their journals. Our specialty imprint, the Educational Publishing Foundation (EPF), publishes APA Division and other society journals that are predominately psychological in content.

In 2011, APA launched an APA Journals app available free of charge for the iPhone^® or iPad^®. It enables users to view the tables-of-contents to all APA published journal issues as well as track any content.

The book program, which began in the mid-1950’s with the publication of occasional books, now publishes an average of 75 books each year. Perhaps the most widely known is the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association^®, now in its seventh edition.

APA Books^®, the largest imprint, has more than 900 books in print that are selected to meet the needs of APA's diverse membership of scholars, clinicians, researchers, and students. Included in this imprint is a growing list of reference titles such as the APA Dictionary of Psychology (and its abridged and collegiate derivatives), and a distinguished series of multi-volume handbooks investigating core areas in psychology.

The APA Psychotherapy Video Series includes a substantial number of training videos. The APA LifeTools^® imprint specializes in self-help books designed to make psychological science available to the mass market.

Magination Press^®, APA’s children’s book imprint, publishes storybooks, workbooks and educational books to help children and the adults in their lives deal with a wide variety of challenges and concerns.

Psychological Abstracts, first published in 1927, led to the development of APA PsycInfo^®, the database of bibliographic information first offered electronically in 1967. Other abstracts publications followed. Over the years, APA has continuously added legacy data to APA PsycInfo while expanding current coverage so that the database is an extraordinarily comprehensive resource for psychology and numerous other related disciplines.

Today, APA PsycInfo is one of several APA electronic products. In 2001, the association began offering its collection of journals electronically in the APA PsycArticles^® database, and steadily extended the digital content backwards in time. APA PsycArticles now contains all APA journals back to Volume 1, Issue 1.

APA PsycExtra^® is an innovative gray literature database, an abstracting and indexing database that has been expanded to contain full text for approximately 70 percent of the file. APA PsycBooks^®, a database of full-text of books in psychology, includes APA-published titles, classic resources in Psychology, the Encyclopedia of Psychology, and out-of-print books from 1880 to 2005.

In 2011, APA added two new electronic products. APA PsycTests^® is a research database that provides access to complete psychological tests, measures, scales, and other assessments as well as descriptive and administrative information for each instrument. APA PsycTherapy^® is a database of streaming therapy demonstrations featuring clinicians working with participants that offers synchronized, searchable transcripts, and allows users to create playlists of videos or clips from within videos.