IMPORTANT NOTES:
1. You can use the little bars ( like
) at the bottom of the screen to switch back and forth between the two full windows.
2. You can resize both windows, using the
in the lower right corner of the window to make each smaller, so they are overlapping but both open at the same time. Clicking in one will bring it in front of the other. You can drag the window around by clicking on blue bar at the top.
or 
button
to return after you have looked yourself up!
A thesaurus is a very powerful tool when searching an enormous and enormously complex database like PsycInfo. It is a way to assure that you have found all of the relevant material in the database on your topic. Think of it as a kind of dictionary to the language of the database. Every item (or record) in the PsycInfo database describes a source of information, an article in a journal, a chapter in a book, a dissertation, etc. Part of this description (or record) is a set of terms called DESCRIPTORS. These descriptors can be single words or phrases. A real live person (as opposed to a computer) selects the best descriptors for any particular article, chapter, etc. and those descriptors then become part of the record for that item in the PsycInfo database.
Let's look at one particular example. Imagine I did a simple search, gender differences and cigarettes. This is one of the records I would retrieve:
AUTHOR: Etter,-Jean-Francois; Prokhorov,-Alexander-V; Perneger,-Thomas-V
TITLE: Gender differences in the psychological determinants of cigarette smoking.
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2002
SOURCE: Addiction. 2002 Jun; Vol 97(6): 733-743
PUBLISHER: United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers.
ISSN (PRINT VERSION): 0965-2140
LANGUAGE: English
ABSTRACT: Compared the distributions of smoking-related variables and the size of associations between these variables in men and women. 2,934 daily smokers who volunteered for a smoking cessation trial were surveyed. Follow-up occurred after 7 mo in 2,456 people (84%). Women smoked less than men (18 vs 22 cigarettes per day), had lower confidence in their ability to refrain from smoking, used more frequently the strategy defined as coping with the temptation to smoke and reported more drawbacks of smoking. There was no gender difference in the distribution of smokers by stage of change. At follow-up, smoking cessation rates were similar in men and women. Intention to quit, quit attempts in the previous year and a more frequent use of self-change strategies predicted smoking cessation and were associated with tobacco dependence in both sexes. A more frequent use by women of coping strategies suggests that some women are self-restrained smokers who control their smoking permanently. This could explain lower smoking rates in women. The size of associations between smoking-related variables was similar in men and women. Even though there were gender differences in the distributions of some smoking-related variables, associations between these variables were similar in men and women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2002 APA, all rights reserved)
MAJOR DESCRIPTORS: *Human-Sex-Differences; *Psychosocial-Factors; *Tobacco-Smoking
MINOR DESCRIPTORS: Smoking-Cessation
Notice where the words in my search statement appear. Within the DESCRIPTORS: in the record are words and phrases representing those same ideas, but using difference words.
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Which phrase in the DESCRIPTORS: means the same thing as gender differences ?
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Which phrase in the DESCRIPTORS: means the same thing as cigarettes ?
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That simple search, gender differences and cigarettes, retrieved only about 50 items in PsycInfo, many of them dissertations. In reality, though, there are hundreds of journal articles alone on this topic in PsycInfo. If I had used the descriptor terms, human sex differences, tobacco smoking, smoking cessation, in my search instead of gender differences and cigarettes, I would get those hundreds. That is one real good reason to learn about the thesaurus!
Another reason to use the thesaurus is a little more complicated to illustrate. If one of the ideas you are searching for is a very common word in psychology circles, like "divorce" or "treatment", then selecting those ideas through the Thesaurus assures that those ideas are the focus of the material retrieved rather than just words mentioned in passing in the abstract.
So, to summarize, the power of the thesaurus is twofold:
1. It increases the amount of material retrieved.
2. It increases the relevancy of what is retrieved.
a.k.a. MORE & BETTER! Can't beat that.
Before you even connect to PsycInfo, you need to do a little thinking about your topic. Your goal is to reword your topic with a computer in mind! Let's take a nice natural language topic, treating people with eating disorders in group therapy , as an example.
First, you need to break it down into its MAIN IDEAS. In this case, there are really two: 1. eating disorders, and 2. group therapy.
Then, you need to think of a SINGLE WORD, or several single words, that best represent each of the ideas. For each of those phrases, one of the two words is more specific than the other: 1. eating 2. group. Let's face it, "disorders" and "therapy" are rather common in psychology!
The roots of those 2 words will then become the words you begin searching in the thesaurus. And, it is, literally, the ROOT word. So, the idea of "eating" would become eat. "Group" is already the root. You should not use any suffixes/endings, plural or otherwise.
It is also a good idea to have some alternative words in mind or the different ideas just in case those do not prove productive. I cannot really think of a logical alternative for group. However, for "eating", things like "food" or even key words for specific eating disorders, like "anorexia", or "bulimia", would be good options.
Having done this kind of thinking in preparation, it is time to hit the thesaurus.
To get to PsycInfo, you first need to go to the library's homepage. PsycInfo is one of the many databases you will find in the different lists there. You can get to it by going to Databases by Subject and selecting Psychology or Counseling-Psychology. Or, you can go to the A-Z list and select it from that. When you are ready to open that 2nd window, click on the bar below to go to the library's homepage.
Once you are in PsycInfo, click on the 
tab above the search box in the blue panel.
This is where you enter your root key words. Try the first one: group
You get quite a list! The terms in blue are hotlinks. If you click on one, it will move you out of this list and over to the description of that term. You don't want to do that until you have gone through the list to see everything that might be of interest. In fact, there are at least two different thesaurus terms here for "group therapy." Scroll through all the terms here now and think about which ones mean "group therapy."
| Which two do you think are the most useful for the idea of "group therapy?" |
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You can now select the terms you decide work for you by clicking
in the little boxes next to them, like this: 
This MARKS them. Once you have marked all the relevant terms, you then click
one of these:
in the yellow band. Well, that's clear, isn't it? Explode? Perhaps a little
explanation is needed here, so, instead of marking anything now, click on the
hotlink for Group Psychotherapy.
What you are looking at now is a description of that term in the Thesaurus. Before we were just looking at a list of terms. These descriptions are worth examining. They provide all of this potentially useful information:
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DESCRIPTION |
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This part of the term description tells you about other descriptors that are NARROWER conceptually. In other words, Encounter Group Therapy and Therapeutic Community are subsets of Group Psychotherapy. If you selected/marked Group Psychotherapy and then clicked on the EXPLODE marked, you would automatically get everything under these NARROWER descriptors as well. That is the purpose of "exploding." The little (+) next to Encounter Group Therapy means that there are additional NARROWER terms under that. Exploding Group Psychotherapy does not automatically get these. To get these, you would need to mark Encounter Group Therapy as well. |
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This part of the term description tells you about other descriptors that are BROADER conceptually. In other words, Psychotherapy is broader than Group Psychotherapy. You can also think of it the other way around. Group Psychotherapy is a subset of Psychotherapy. If you exploded Psychotherapy you would automatically get everything under Group Psychotherapy as well as anything else lised as NARROWER under Psychotherapy, probably a whole lot of stuff! |
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This part of the term description tells you about other descriptors that are RELATED conceptually. BROADER. In other words, Group Psychotherapy is related to Support Groups and Group Development, and so on. The relationships are many, and varied. Only YOU can decide if any of those related terms are relevant to your particular needs. |
In the case of our "group therapy" search, all of the relevant terms we needed showed up in the list under Group. They do not all appear under the term Group Psychotherapy, though. Group Counseling is not there, oddly, not even in the Related Terms. So, the thesaurus is fallible. That is why you need to take your time and browse all the terms that come up under key words and also look at the NARROWER, RELATED, and even BROADER terms you get in the description of each descriptor. It can take awhile!
After all that, it is time to do some EXPLODING and SEARCHING. So, go back into the list of terms under Group and mark and EXPLODE Group Counseling and Group Psychotherapy.
Once you have done that, records will appear in the bottom half of the screen, with this at the top:
We have just created a Set, Set #1. You will learn more about that later.
| What is the root word we need to search in the Thesaurus to look for relevant descriptors for the idea of "eating disorders?" |
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Go ahead and do that thesaurus search now.
| What is the one descriptor that best fits the idea of "eating disorders?" |
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Go ahead and click on that descriptor now, and read about the term. Turns out that it is a fairly new descriptor!
| What descriptor was used for the idea of "eating disorders" before 1997? |
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Now, go ahead and MARK the descriptor Eating Disorders. Then take a look at all the descriptors listed under NARROWER and RELATED. Some of the terms under NARROWER don't seem to fit, though, do they? Let's just mark Anorexia-Nervosa and Bulimia. Likewise, under RELATED there are some that seem rather distantly related. Go ahead and mark Binge-Eating, though.
Which button do you want to click
on now,
or  ? |
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Go ahead and click on
now to create another set. This is now our "eating disorders" set,
probably #2.
Now that we have created a set for each idea, it is time to do some combining.
To do that we need to leave the thesaurus. Click on the tab 
above the search box.
In the bottom half of the screen you should be looking at a list of the sets you have created, most likely two of them. When I did this, mine looked like this:
In the Results column is the number of records in the database that contain those descriptors. Pretty big numbers! This database goes back all the way to 1887 and covers the topic of psychology very broadly and internationally. The numbers are often large. But, when we combine those two sets, the numbers will shrink considerably.
We want the records that have BOTH of those ideas in them. So, we want to combine
them using the Boolean AND. Notice your options in the yellow band: 
.
Those are the two Boolean operators, AND and OR. Notice that OR already appears
in the 2 sets you have created. OR is used to separate alternatives. We did
that in the thesaurus for each idea already. Now we need to do the opposite
and use AND.
There are two ways to do that:
1. You can mark both sets by clicking in the boxes next to them. Then you just
click on the 
.
2. You can type this command into the search box: #1 and #2
If you do the first, then you will then get a Set #3, something like this:
and to see the results, you need to click on 
the
to the right of set #3.
If you do the 2nd, then the records will begin displaying in the bottom half of the screen automatically. Saves a step!
Well, that's the end of this little tutorial. You can close this window now and go ahead and do your own searching, or you can get some more practice and slightly EXPAND on what you just did, by taking this little Practice Quiz (everyone gets an A on this quiz, so CLICK HERE to go for it!), or go on to the final assessment, which really quizzes you and sends your responses for evaluation.
For more tips on searching, you might want to take a look at our online guide, Tips for Searching PsycInfo on the WWW.
Tutorial created 18 November 2003
Last revised 26 November 2003
by Gail Gradowski, Orradre Library, Santa Clara University.
