Search the Psychological Journal Literature With

Search the Psychological Literature with PsycINFO from EBSCOhost

What is PsycINFO? PsycINFO, a database created by the American Psychological Association, contains more than 1.8 million citations and summaries of journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports in the field of psychology and related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business, and law. Journal coverage dates back to the late 1880s and includes materials selected from more than 1,700 periodicals in over 30 languages. Links are also available to more than 25,000 full-text articles found in the PsycARTICLES database.

How do you Access PsycINFO? PsycINFO can be accessed from the Library's homepage (http://library.indstate.edu/) by placing your mouse over Databases, clicking on Alphabetical List, selecting P, then PsycINFO. A link to PsycINFO is also found in the Database Subject List for psychology, also available from the Database section of the library home page.

Searching PsycINFO: To perform a simple keyword search, just type your search term in the Find: box and click on the Search button.

Simple Limiting in PsycINFO: PsycINFO allows you to limit your search by magazine/ journal title and to full-text articles only.

Selecting Results: To view citations and abstracts for an individual record, just click on the article title (See result example below). Articles or article citations can be printed, emailed or saved to a disk. You can also add articles to your folder and print them all together at the conclusion of your search.

Explanation of Article Links Linked Full Text: Links to the full-text of that article.

Check ISU Catalog for Local Holdings: Automatically searches the ISU Library catalog to see if the library owns the title you are looking for. Check ISU Full-Text E-Journal List: Sees if the library has a full-text electronic version of the article available in another database.

Interlibrary Loan Link: If the library doesn’t have your article, click on this link to go to an interlibrary loan form that will let you order it from another library.

Advanced Searching

To increase your search capabilities click on Advanced Search on the EBSCOhost toolbar (see below).

The advanced search option provides a search grid in which one can create a Boolean (AND, OR, or NOT) search as well as perform various field searches for author affiliation, abstract, age group, item number, author, conference info, institutional author, ISBN, ISSN, source title, key phrase, language, publisher, population location, population, sponsor, subjects, table of contents, title, year field, intended audience, document type, classification code, and dissertation number.

If you scroll down further, you can also apply special limiters like population group (human, animal, male, female, inpatient, outpatient), age groups that range from birth to 85 years, form/content type (e.g. encyclopedia, textbook), special feature (e.g. audio cassette, study guide), publication type (journal article, authored book, edited book, chapter, dissertation, report), language, and intended audience (general public, juvenile, Psychology: professional).

Other Search Options

Publications: To see if PsycINFO indexes a particular journal, you can click on the Publications button located near the top of the EBSCOhost toolbar (see above). Then you can type in the name of the title and click on the Browse button to search the complete title list. Just check off the box next to each title you want to search and click on the Search button. Your search will now only include citations from those particular journals.

Thesaurus: PsycINFO provides a thesaurus to assist you in selecting terms for your search. To use the thesaurus, click on the Thesaurus button located near the top of the EBSCOhost toolbar (see above), and then enter a term. Click on the Browse button to produce a list of relevant subject terms. This list can be in alphabetical order or ranked by relevancy. Click on a subject term for more information, including term definitions and lists of broader, narrower or related terms that you may also want to use in your search. Check off the box next to the term or terms you want to search and click on the Search button. Your search will now only include citations that use the terms you selected.

Authors: PsycINFO provides an option to see if a particular author is indexed in the database and then a further option to conduct a search to find the citations of that particular author. To do an author search, select the Authors link from EBSCOhost toolbar, (see above) then type the last name of the author or the last name plus the first initial or first name and click on the Browse button. Then to find citations from the specific author, check the box next to the author's name and click on the Search button.

Library Instruction, Indiana State University, Terre Haute -- handouts/PsycINFO feb 03 2/2003 [email protected]