Psychology (GSEP)

PsycINFO contains nearly 2.3 million citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports, all in the field of psychology. Journal coverage, which spans from 1887 to present, includes international material selected from more than 2,100 periodicals in over 25 languages.

Why use PsycINFO - comprehensiveness! PsycINFO is the #1 database used by Psyc students. 

1. Boolean Operators: Boolean operators are powerful tools that allow you to combine or exclude keywords in your search, giving you greater control over your results.

AND: Use "AND" to connect different concepts and narrow your search. All connected terms must appear in the search results. For example, (depression AND athletes) will only return articles that discuss both depression and atheletes.

OR: Use "OR" to connect synonyms or related terms and broaden your search. This tells the database to find results that contain at least one of the terms. For example, (teenagers OR adolescents OR youth) will find articles that use any of these terms.

NOT: Use "NOT" to exclude specific terms from your search and refine your results. Be cautious with "NOT" as it can sometimes exclude relevant articles. For example, (dolphins NOT football) will find articles about the marine animal but exclude those about the sports team.

2. Truncation (Wildcard Symbol: *)

Truncation, often represented by an asterisk (*), allows you to search for variations of a word by typing in the root and adding the symbol. This is particularly useful when a word can have multiple endings.

How to Use: Place the asterisk at the point where the word might change. For example, (educat*) will retrieve results containing "educate," "education," "educational," "educator," and "educating." This expands your search to include all relevant forms of a word without needing to type each one out.

3. Quotation Marks (" ")

Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase. This tells the database to treat the words within the quotes as a single, inseparable unit, ensuring that they appear together and in the specified order.

How to Use: Enclose your entire phrase in double quotation marks. For example, "social media impact" will only return results where "social media impact" appears as an exact phrase, rather than articles where "social" appears in one part and "media" or "impact" appears elsewhere. This is invaluable for finding specific concepts or titles.

1. Open PsycInfo. It should open to the screen pictured below. 

2. Enter your search terms (keywords) in the fields on the Advanced Search screen.

3. Use applicable filters. Usually, you are looking for Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals within the past ten years. 

4. Press Search to see your results 

5. Click on an article. To access the text, click on "Access Options". If we have the text, you will be directed to the PDF or link. If not, you can request the article through Interlibrary Loan.