Day 28

I have literally just been scouring through journal after journal for the past few days, including today. I remember just the day before yesterday I thought I had struck gold by picking up on a new idea to look at gerontological journals instead of merely psychology, psychiatric, counselling, and social work journals. The rationale behind this would be of course that, these journals having everything to do with the elderly and older adults, that they woul definitely have something specific in relation to counselling for the elderly.

I was unfortunately sorely disappointed. I realise that even when it comes to gerontological journals that counselling is not that "hot" a topic. I find so many articles on other issues such as physical health, mental health, and so on and so forth. You would think that mental health would coincide with counselling as well (unfortunately no). I even find several articles on tai chi, which amazes me somewhat because I have always thought it to be quite a "niche" subject and had never anticipated that it would be of sufficient note to have entire articles written about it. Yet something that one would consider to be quite important and worth examination does not appear in the journals.


Despite "discovering" the term geropsychology (and realising that several articles or journals do refer to it) and incorporating it into my search, I realise I am still not finding much information on counselling for the elderly. This means I might have to go back to searching under the counselling journals once again - which does honestly feel a bit depressing. I am beginning to wonder how many articles I should include in the literature review as well, because I know that the search will never end (there will always be more articles I can look at, more articles I should include or which fit the description). And if I do not make myself stop, I might find that I do not have sufficient time to write the literature review, even after reading and finding all the articles.


I also have begun to wonder how articles are classified - as in how do you determine where to publish your article? For example, if you have an article or research paper on counselling for the elderly, would you go and publish it in a gerontological journal, or a counselling journal, or a social work or psychology journal? Would you publish it in more than one journal (is that even allowed)? And I realise that part of the reason why I do not know where exactly (or how to) look for these journal articles is because I do not understand how the authors and researchers classify their research papers (i.e. where they choose to publish). I wonder if there are specific guidelines set up that I could possibly refer to.