How to stay evidence-based and keep up with research after you graduate: A guide for psychologists (Solo)

[00:00:05] Bronwyn: Hey, mental workers. You're listening to the Mental Work podcast, the podcast about the realities of working in mental health for early career psychologists. As always, I'm your host, Bronwyn Milkins, and today we are talking about how to stay evidence-based and keep up with research once you graduate. There is no guest today, it's just me, a solo episode, so enjoy!

The reason I'm doing this episode is because I had two listeners write in with versions of roughly the same question. The question is, how do early career psychologists stay up to date with research once they're out of uni, time poor, and no longer have easy access to academic databases? Another listener also said that they would much rather read academic or psychology related papers than just endlessly doom scroll.

It does sound like a simple question, but there's no clear guidance. So I am going to walk you through today what your options look like, and there's going to be lots of links and names in this episode. So I'm going to make a blog post on the Mental Work podcast website, and I'll pop the link to the blog post in the show notes.

Step number one, we need to get clear on what you actually want to read. So psychology is enormous, we all know that. There are literally thousands of articles published every month across clinical counselling, forensic health, neuropsychology, and more. You cannot and should not try to read all of it. The first thing to do is to narrow your focus. Ask yourself what client presentations do I say most often? What treatments do I use or want to develop? And what topics genuinely interest me? Your reading should reflect your practise, your professional development goals, and your curiosity. You're more likely to read something if it actually matters and feels relevant to you.

Now I'm going to go through lots of different avenues that you can get academic papers and clinical practise guidelines through. I just wanna acknowledge what I've called the 'hopeful' approach, which I think is what most psychologists do once they leave university. So what they do is they hope that somebody shares good research on social media, or they follow researchers, or clinicians or organisations on social media who regularly share and comment on new findings.

Another thing that people do is they join special interest Facebook groups. So there are ones which have researchers and academics as members who will post relevant findings directly into those groups. So if you have a niche interest, it's worth checking out.

Another thing psychologists can do is they subscribe to E-newsletters about research. This is genuinely a legitimate strategy. I just wouldn't rely on it as your only one. So probably the newest and most exciting update in the world of finding research is , artificial intelligence, and there's lots of tools that can help you find academic research.

There's the general purpose AI tools like Claude and Chat GPT and Microsoft Copilot. And you can type in something like, summarise the current evidence for DBT with adolescents and get a decent overview. The issue with these general AI tools is that sometimes they can do what's known as hallucinations, and that is essentially they make stuff up. So sometimes when I do this, I will directly tell it to not make it up, but oftentimes I use other AI tools. So my favourite one to use right now is called Consensus AI. It's a free tool with limits. So there is a paid tier, but it's built specifically for searching academic literature and tries to give you a direct answer to a question by drawing on peer reviewed sources.

These are some AI tools that I've come across. One is Scopus AI . This is also my favourite one, but it's only available if you have access to the Scopus database, which most of the time if you don't have an affiliation with the university, you don't have access to, but it's my favourite one. It's worthwhile knowing it's free if you do have Scopus access. The other one is called Semantic Scholar. Now this is completely free, so I'd recommend this one. I've only played around it a little bit, but it looks like a solid middle ground between Google Scholar and something like the Scopus one.

Speaking of Google Scholar, that is free comprehensive, and it's often underused by a lot of clinicians post-graduation. Google Scholar indexes a huge range of academic literature and often links directly to freely available versions of articles, including open access papers.

One other thing you can do is Google Scholar alerts. So you can set alerts for topics, specific authors or keywords, and Google Scholar will send you a new email when a matching result appears.

Another website is called ResearchGate. This is a social networking site for researchers and authors frequently upload post-print versions, that is those peer reviewed versions, but not yet formatted for the journal or also copies of their articles. It's not always complete, but I've definitely found research articles on ResearchGate when I haven't been able to access them elsewhere.

 Now I'm gonna take you through a few options that you may not be aware of. So your local library might have access to databases, which host a large number of psychology articles. For example, where I live in my state, if I have a free state library membership, I get access to ProQuest, which is a really large database that includes psychology articles.

Another option is to see if your old university has alumni access to the library. Mine does, and again, I have access to ProQuest and PubMed, which have a lot of psychology articles too, and that's completely free for me, it might be different from your university, but do check it out, it can be an undertapped resource.

Another resource is professional associations. So in Australia, our largest organisations are the Australian Association of Psychologists, AAPI, and the Australian Psychological Society. Both provide members with access to select journals as part of their membership and also access to books. So it's worth factoring in and weighing up whether a membership can give you lots of value, it usually does, and whether you get access to the journals that you're hoping for as well, because they may not align with what you want to read. So check the journal list before you assume it covers your area.

One other one you might not know about is your workplace. So if you work in a government setting, particularly in the Department of Health or another state or federal government department, there's a good chance that your employer has a library service. So do check it out.

Something that is often less free is training and professional development. Now that said, in Australia we have this amazing thing called the Mental Health Professionals Network, MHPN, and that runs a huge number of free webinars, which are often delivered by academics or researchers in specific areas. I, I just delivered one to a mental health practitioner network and it was really good and I did share the latest research, so it can be a really valuable way of having access to up-to-date research. So you can sign up for free at the Mental Health Professionals Network website.

Now if you just want to read a few bits and pieces of psychology research in an engaging way, there are a few really good websites. My favourite is called The Conversation. So this is a large media organisation whose articles are all written by academics and it's often academics sharing accurate writeups of their own research or research in their expert area. It's free to access and it can be a really good way to access topical psychology information that is evidence-based.

Another really big one is the British Psychological Society. I think they are the winners, honestly, in communicating psychological research and they have a free fortnightly email newsletter and blog that summarises the latest peer reviewed psychology research in plain language. It's written by people with psychology backgrounds and the goal is to make findings engaging and accessible. So you can subscribe for free on their website. I've taken out a subscription and despite being British, the content is broadly relevant to Australian practitioners as well. .

Okay, so I've gone through a lot of things, and as I said, I've put all these links on the blog post at mentalworkpodcast.com. And let's put it all together, the honest truth is that nobody does all these things. I don't do all these things, and I am a researcher. The most sustainable approach is to pick two or three strategies that fit your life and your practise and do this consistently. Whether it's putting aside time to read one journal article a week or a month, whatever works, so you don't have to be perfect.

The aim is to prevent what is called therapist drift, and this is when we get more remote from evidence-based strategies and then fail to use them in our practise. For most people, keeping up to date with evidence looks like setting up a Google Scholar alert for a few key topics, following a handful of researchers or organisations on social media, and checking in with your professional associations journals a few times a year, that's it. That's probably enough to stay meaningfully informed without it becoming a second job.

And then if you're unsure about something, like, I remember a few weeks ago, I was like, what's the evidence for sharing mental health diagnoses with children and how should I go about it? And my supervisor actually suggested that I look up the literature. So if you do have a specific question, knowing how to search for specific articles can be really handy.

So if you wanna get an idea of what's happening and what's the latest in a specific area, let's just say cognitive behavioural therapy for depression... if you wanna know what's the latest is happening, what you wanna do is go to Google Scholar and then type in CBT for depression and review or meta-analysis. So that'll bring up a latest review or a meta-analysis. And , we know in our pyramid of evidence that a meta-analysis, randomised controlled trial, systematic review or any type of review is at the top of our evidence.

So I really like going to these articles because they'll often give you a summary in the introduction of whether literature is up to, and you can go down a walk of different studies if you want to, but you can also just get the latest results in the results section. And then often the first paragraph in the discussion also summarises those results. So it's really handy. If you don't wanna read the whole article what I would say is look for any section specifically labelled clinical implications or implications for practise. This is where researchers would translate their findings into what it actually means for people doing the work, spelling out what clinicians should do differently, what to be cautious about, and what gaps remain. It's often just a few paragraphs, but it's usually the most directly applicable part of the paper to us as clinicians.

Now applying what you read to your practise can be the most difficult part. It's like, okay, I understand this research, I understand what it's saying, now how do you incorporate it into your practise? I think the first thing to be aware of is that when we look at large scale studies, these are often averages and they may not reflect the nuances of the individual case in front of you. So it's really important to take the research and then think of what are my specific client's needs and how can this research inform what I'm doing with my client? Supervision can be really helpful in translating the evidence into what you do in your clinical practise.

You can ask yourself, what would it look like to use what the researcher recommends in practise? Sometimes it means adapting a specific technique like trauma informed care for treating people with eating disorders, and you might need to do that for your specific client who may or may not have a trauma history. Sometimes it's more subtle, like updating your psychoeducation, learning something from the article and being like, oh, I didn't know that it was explainable that way. Or you could be more confident recommending one approach over another. So for example, saying that medication and therapy together seem to be most effective for people with moderate to severe depression. That can be a good thing in your toolkit to let clients know or sometimes letting go of something you're trained to do because newer research suggests better alternatives.

Now what I find most helpful in terms of my clinical practise is, yes, I love those articles which have clinical implication section and give me updates to my broad psychoeducation or knowledge of the field but I also really like clinical practise guidelines. These are specific things that practitioners should and shouldn't do. So if you wanna get a current clinical practise guideline, you can set a Google Scholar alert for the condition you're interested in, plus clinical practise guideline, and then filter it by year.

When trying to find clinical practise guidelines, there's no universal website that keeps them all for psychological practise, but there are a few big organisations that do have them. What I would recommend first is checking NICE. NICE stands for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. It's a UK organisation, but they have lots of clinical practise guidelines for mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions. So you can find a latest one there. And they also have quite guidelines that are in development as well. So I was just having a look and I can see that there is an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Body Dysmorphic Disorder Assessment and management guideline, which is expected for publication in February 2027. So that is, you know, as update as you can get.

In Australia, we have a journal called Clinical Psychologist and they publish some clinical practise guidelines too. The Australian Psychological Society has a whole document, it's very lengthy about evidence-based psychological interventions. So it doesn't say what you should do and shouldn't do, but it does give you an idea of what is evidence-based for a wide variety of conditions. The American Psychological Society has a bunch of clinical practise guidelines, as does the American Psychiatric Association. And again in Australia, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists has their own set of clinical practise guidelines. I really like these and I have looked at them before and I do use them.

If you need more specific guidelines, you'll need to know the organisations in Australia that publish them generally. So for example, the Australasian ADHD Professionals Association published the Clinical Practise Guideline for ADHD a few years ago. Phoenix Australia is a large trauma focused organisation in Australia and they have published a clinical practise guideline for PTSD.

So it's not easy finding these clinical practise guidelines, but once you know what you are interested in your field, you can look up the associated organisations, you can ask your colleagues, ask your supervisor, and then you can go find the latest clinical practise guidelines. I find these very helpful, and sometimes I rely on them when telling clients about things if I need to get really serious and evidence-based with clients, so I'll be like, so I'm following these clinical practise guidelines. I do find it helpful.

Okay, I hope that wasn't too dry ! It's a lot of, like, naming the things, but maybe the takeaway I want to leave you with is that if you do one or two things every month to help you stay up to date with evidence and then question yourself like, huh, am I using the latest evidence-based thing, I think you're doing a good job.

As a researcher myself, I try and read research articles when I can. I usually try and make sure that I'm up to date with the clinical practise guidelines, but nobody is perfect and we're not robots, so it can't be perfect. Give the blog a read so you can go check out a few of the links that I mentioned here today, and I hope this was helpful.

That's a wrap. Thanks so much for listening to Mental Work. I'm Bronwyn Milkins. Have a good run and catch you next time.