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Tips forSearching PsycInfoon the WWW |
Navigational
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Quick & Dirty
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Limits of a
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Thesaurus
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Fancy Stuff! |
Click on 
at
any time to return to the top of this page.
PsycInfo is available on the WWW. Select it from the list of Databases on the Web on the library's homepage. Off campus, you will be asked for your name and barcode from your ACCESS card. The barcode is the long number on the back of your ACCESS card.
Once you have entered PsycInfo, you will be looking at the main SIMPLE searching screen. The top half, kind of light purple in color, is for searching. The bottom half is where your results will appear.
The searching area consists of these main components:
The Simple Search box, which looks like this: 
The Tabs above the search box take you to different screens. Each is described in more detail elsewhere in this guide as well:
Advanced Search offers you some fancy options.
Thesaurus takes you to the language guide for more focused PsycInfo searching. The Thesaurus is such a great, but very complicated tool, that we have a short, but entertaining and instructional, tutorial on using it. To do the tutorial, click HERE.
The Index allows you to search for Author, for example.
The Search History tab takes you to a screen that lists all the searches you have done.
The 
pulldown menu allows you to specify WHERE you want the words you type in to appear. This will become clearer later!
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To the right of this are some important limits:
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Click the 
button to see all the possible Limits:
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You will want to consider making some limits. The most useful are described below. The first 3 are recommended for everyone. The others can be risky to set before you search. You might want to wait and see what kind of results you are getting before applying them. Click on LANGUAGE allows you to limit to English, a good idea in this very international database! PUBLICATION YEAR allows you to search specify how far back in time you want to go. The database goes back to 1887! DOCUMENT TYPE allows you to select the type of publications retrieved. You can choose from Peer-Reviewed-Journal in this menu to restrict your search results to scholarly journal articles. Also useful for many people are chapters in books. The others, like dissertations are less helpful! To select more than ONE type, click on one and then hold down the CTRL key to make multiple selections. If you are using a MAC, use the SHIFT key. AGE GROUP allows you to focus your searching to a particular population, by age. Choices include CHILDREN, INFANTS, ADOLESCENTS, among others. Be sure, though, to select ALL the different ones that match your idea of your age group. For example, to get all teenagers, you would need to select all of these in that menu: ADOLESCENCE, YOUNG-ADULTHOOD, 13-17-YRS. If you are using a PC, hold down the CTRL key to make multiple selections. If you are using a MAC, use the SHIFT key. Remember! If you select your age group here, you do not need to enter search terms for them in your search statements. POPULATION allows you to focus your searching to a particular population from among very broad groups, like FEMALE or ANIMAL or HUMAN. If you are searching for a topic that is likely to have a lot of animal research, this is very useful in eliminating that or restricting to that population. If you select FEMALE here, you do not need to enter search terms for women in your search statements. |
The search box is where you type your search statement. Probably, you will want to use that Find Terms limit option and search In Subject. Then you simply type a keyword search statement comprised of essential words/phrases, separated by AND and OR. And, always, always, truncate (use the asterisk*) for variable endings. See these examples:
memory and eyewitness*
stress* and cultur*
college student* and (alcohol* or drink*)
Once you enter a search statement and click Search, you will see the first page of your results appear in the frame below. To do another search, simply type another search in the search box. To see your earlier search statement(s), click the Search History tab.
For more detailed information on formulating search statements, go to Quick & Dirty Searching or Fancy Stuff.
To make the reviewing portion of the screen fill the entire screen, click on the 
. When you want to go back to searching, just click on it again. It kind of toggles off and on that way.
Use the scroll bar in the results part of the screen to move through the records. To move to additional pages of results, click the 
in the bar at the top of the results.
The results are really of three types in terms of what you have to do to get more than an abstract, i.e. the full text:
1. Articles available fulltext in PsycArticles. These will have this link towards the bottom of the citation:
If you click on that link, another window will open and you will be taken to the article itself. The formatting of that article is not ideal as it appears, though. If you want to see the article as it would appear in a paper journal, with page numbers and such, you need to look for this link:
2. Articles that aren't from APA journals. For these, look for this hotlink:
Clicking on that will open another window with a search of our journals holding list. For example, let's say this was the article you needed:
You would get this from the journals holdings list:
Click on the hotlink, and you will find out which years and volumes of that journal we have.
We only have the journal in paper (print), so you will need to come to the library to get that article.
If we have full text articles from the journal in another database, you will see something like this:
This is saying that we have fulltext articles from the Journal of Counseling and Development, for different years, in 3 different databases. In this case, Academic Search Elite is going to be the most complete, starting with 1985 and continuing to PRESENT, i.e. most recent. Whenever you have a link to a database that sounds like it is business related, it will be incomplete. And, Wilson OmniFile only goes back to 1999 and is lacking the most recent year and a half.
If you click on the hotlink to the database, most often you are taken to a list of the issues of the journal. You need to click your way through to the specific issue and article you need.
Alternatively, as you scroll through, Mark the records you are interested in printing or saving. Do this by clicking on the little box,
, at the upper left edge of each record. you can then print the citations and look them up in the journals list afterwards.
3. It is not a journal article! If you didn't limit your search to journal articles, you could be looking at a citation to a book, chapter in a book, dissertation. To put your hands on these, it is best to mark the ones you are interested in by clicking on the little box,
After you have marked the records you wish to print, save,
or email, click on the corresponding button,
, in the far right of the yellow band above the results display. Some of the details of each of these functions depend on the setup of
the specific machine you are using. The specifics below are based on what you
would encounter if you were using one of the computers in the reference room
of the library.
Once you click on the Print or Save icons, you will be presented with a little menu of options about which records you want and in what format. Odds are, that you will want the defaults. If you marked any records, the default is to print/save what you marked. Optionally, you can specify which, by number, or all of the records. The default is to print/save the record exactly as it looked while you were reviewing. Again, there are other choices available to you if you click on the Change Fields button.
Once you click on the Email icon, you will be presented with a little menu of options. You can change the default Subject line and add your own subject line to go with it. Odds are, that you will want the defaults for the rest. If you marked any records, the default is to email only what you marked. Optionally, you can specify which or all of the records. The default is to send the record exactly as it looked while you were reviewing. There are other choices available to you if you click on the Change Fields button.
A PsycInfo search will give you citations of three basic types of material: JOURNAL ARTICLES, BOOKS and DISSERTATIONS.
BRACE YOURSELF... There are a lot of steps in this process, but, once you've done it a few dozen times, it gets real easy!
First look for a hotlink to the fulltext of the article. . Articles available fulltext in PsycArticles. These will have this link towards the bottom of the citation: If you click on that link, another window will open and you will be taken to the article itself. The formatting of that article is not ideal as it appears, though. If you want to see the article as it would appear in a paper journal, with page numbers and such, you need to look for this link:
For articles that aren't from APA journals, look for this hotlink:
Clicking on that will open another window with a search of our journals holding list. For example, let's say this was the article you needed:
You would get this from the journals holdings list:
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Click on the hotlink, and you will find out which years and volumes of that journal we have. |
We only have the journal in paper (print), so you will need to come to the library to get that article.
If we have full text articles from the journal in another database, you will see something like this:
This is saying that we have fulltext articles from the Journal of Counseling and Development, for different years, in 3 different databases. In this case, Academic Search Elite is going to be the most complete, starting with 1985 and continuing to PRESENT, i.e. most recent. Whenever you have a link to a database that sounds like it is business related, it will be incomplete. And, Wilson OmniFile only goes back to 1999 and is lacking the most recent year and a half.
If you click on the hotlink to the database, most often you are taken to a list of the issues of the journal. You need to click your way through to the specific issue and article you need.
Alternatively, as you scroll through, Mark the records you are interested in printing or saving. Do this by clicking on the little box,
Check with Oscar to see if we have the book you need. If you do not find it on Oscar, ALWAYS click on the 
button to see if this very quick interlibrary loan service can help. For more details on LINK+ click on this LINK+ hotlink. But, before you go to Oscar, first determine which DOCUMENT TYPE you are looking at. In the PsycInfo record, each item has a DOCUMENT TYPE (DT) FIELD. There are 3 possible "book" types are:
BOOK, AUTHORED BOOK, or EDITED BOOK Then you will look up the TITLE of the book on Oscar by doing a title search. Be sure to note the STATUS, whether or not is checked out. A date in the STATUS box means it is checked out and due on that day. If it says CHECK SHELVES, then the book is not checked out. If you cannot find the book, be sure to stop at the Circulation Desk. They can assist you.
DISSERTATION ABSTRACT is a record describing a dissertation. That's a kind of book, unpublished. You can look these up on Oscar as you would a book, but it is unlikely that we would have it. Make sure you also check LINK+, though! Probably you will have to request it through our interlibrary loan service, called Bronco Express. If you are an undergraduate student, you probably do NOT want a dissertation! Before requesting it, check with your professor to see if it is OK to use dissertations in your research. These are NOT considered published scholarly sources.
CHAPTER Then you still need to look up the title of the BOOK. This is not going to be found in the PsycInfo field labeled TITLE, though. It will be, instead, in the field called BOOK SOURCE. That field includes other information about the book as well as the title. It is usually pretty obvious, though, what the title is. Then look that up on Oscar. A typical BOOK SOURCE field looks like this:
In this example above, you would look up the TITLE Trends in posttraumatic stress disorder research on Oscar.
Unfortunately, the "quick" is pretty much inseparable from the "dirty". What this means is that if you want to do a quick search, you must expect it to be less than perfect. Generally, what happens is that you will either retrieve far too little or, more likely, a whole lot of citations, but only a few will be good.
Nevertheless, time is always a factor, so it is worth a shot! Follow these steps to turn your topic into a quick and dirty search statement.
1.Write your topic as a set of key words. For example, if you wanted articles on how people in different cultures handle stress, you would break that down into these key words:
culture stress
2. Consider other common ways of expressing the different ideas. For example, "culture" in this situation could be equated with "nationality" or "ethnicity".
3. Now, you have to rewrite those key words and phrases for the computer using a simple little language known as Boolean. The most basic Boolean is just two words, AND and OR and parentheses, ( ). You do this by putting the Boolean AND between different ideas and Boolean OR between different ways of expressing the same idea. You use the parentheses to group the OR's expressions. So, the example above would become:
(culture or ethnicity or nationality) and stress
4. You need to make one more modification. That is truncation. You use the asterisk* at the ends of words to pick up variable endings. Even the difference between singular and plural can be quite important. So, you would have something that looked like this:
(cultur* or ethnic* or national*) and stress*
5. You are ready to type that search statement into PsycInfo. Follow the instructions under Entering a Search Statement.
Boolean
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Language as in Focusing Your Search |
Limits
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Fields |
Searching by Author |
Using Sets to Do Really Fancy Stuff |
Use AND to narrow your search results. Think of it as a refining tool. You are adding criteria to your search. For example, if you want to find things about gender differences in stress management, you have two MAIN ideas there, the idea of gender and the idea of stress management. So, rewriting that phrase in Boolean, you would use the AND. In Boolean, then, it would come out as:
gender differences and stress management
Every time you ADD an IDEA, you add an AND.
You use OR to broaden your search. Think of this as a way of hedging your bets. It is a way to allow for the possibility that one of the ideas you are searching for can be expressed using different, but equally valid, terms. For example, in the search described above, one might logically use the term sex differences instead of gender differences, right? Then, we would end up with:
(gender differences or sex differences) and stress management
Notice the PARENTHESES ( ). Whenever you mix your ANDs and your ORs in a single search statement, you must use parentheses to group ideas. Without the parentheses, the search may or may not work the way you intended. In the example above, without the paentheses grouping gender differences or sex differences you could end up retrieving every item in the database that has to do with gender differences regardless of whether or not it was about stress management.
Use TRUNCATION to pick up variations in spelling. Truncation is the use of a symbol as a wild card. Details on the use of the symbol vary from database to database, but it is a common computer searching device. For PsycInfo, the symbol is the asterisk *, and it is used at the ends of root words to pick up variations in endings. For example, if we do this, stress*, we would pick up stress, stressed, stressful, and so on.
The PsycInfo database uses a very elaborate vocabulary to describe the subject contents of the journal articles and books it indexes. The words and phrases that comprise this vocabulary are called DESCRIPTORS. A complete list of these descriptors is contained in a dictionary-like tool called the Thesaurus. The Thesaurus exists in book form in the Reference Room of the library but also on the computer. You can access it while you are in PsycInfo by clicking on the tab labeled THESAURUS just above the search box.
It is a good idea to look up your main idea terms in the Thesaurus. For example, if you were to look up GENDER DIFFERENCES in the Thesaurus, you would discover that:
The term GENDER DIFFERENCES is not a descriptor at all, but that you should use the descriptor HUMAN SEX DIFFERENCES
That among related descriptors is a narrower one that might be useful here, SEX LINKED DEVELOPMENTAL DIFFERENCES.
The Thesaurus is such a great, but very complicated tool, that we have a short, but entertaining and instructional, tutorial on using it. To do the tutorial, click HERE.
PsycInfo is a very complex database. One of the complexities is the number of fields in the record. Take a look at this PsycInfo record of a journal article citation. I retrieved it using the search statement described above: human sex differences and stress
In the record above, the fields names appear in red in all caps. These fields sometimes are abbreviated with 2- or 3-letter codes, like AU for AUTHOR or SO for SOURCE. What is contained in these fields can be obvious, like AUTHOR, LANGUAGE. Others are special fields created to help describe the subject coverage in fine detail.
The two fields that are going to be the most useful for you in searching a topic are MAJOR DESCRIPTORS (abbreviated as DEM) and MINOR DESCRIPTORS (abbreviated as DER). These two fields together are the DESCRIPTOR fields, i.e. the words and phrases from the Thesaurus, discussed in detail in the section on Language. In the record above, five ideas have been deemed MAJOR and one of lesser importance, a minor descriptor.
In searching, you can tell the computer to just search in a specific field. You can do this by using the abbreviated field label in your search statement like this:
stress in dem
Clearly, though, to search the DEM field, you need to KNOW that the word or phrase you are searching is a descriptor. To know that, you must look it up in the thesaurus or see it used in a record (like the one above!). An easy way to search within the different "subject" fields (PsycInfo includes both major and minor descriptors and title in this broad terminology) is to use the Find Terms box to the right of the search box and change Anywhere to In Subject
You can search authors and titles like this, too. A quick way to look for articles by Tracey Kahan, for example, you could enter this search statement: Tracey Kahan in au. NOTE, though, that this is a kind of "quick & dirty" way to search authors. See section on Searching by Author to see how to do a more thorough job of it.
For more details on using the different fields, click on 
in
the top panel of the search screen. Then click on Fields
to get more information on what fields are available and how you search within
just a specific field.
The best way to find everything in the PsycInfo database by a certain person is to use the Index. Index is one of the tabs above the search box. Click on it and you will get a search box with a pulldown menu of the different indexes to search. You want to select BROWSABLE AUTHOR INDEX. Then you want to enter the last name of the author you are seeking, followed by a space and their first initial, the Term box. So, for Tracey Kahan, I would type in:
kahan t and then click the 
box. In the search results part of the screen you will see a long list of names beginning with "kahan t". Browse through these for all the variations of "t kahan" you can find. Mark all the likely candidates by clicking in the tiny box to the left of the name. Then, click on the 
box. You need to do this because authors' names do not always appear the same way in every publication. Middle initials come and go, for example. If you want to do a thorough job, you need to browse for all likely variations.
Every time you type something in the search box and do a search, a set is created. If you did this search:
gender differences and stress
this would appear on the Search History screen:
This screen is one of the tabs above your search box. When you click on that tab, you see that instead of the search results. If you were to then modify that search and do this search:
(gender differences or sex differences) and stress
the Search History screen would look like this:
These sets are not really useful. The way to USE these sets is to logically create them in a series. What you want to do is create a separate set for each IDEA in your topic. And, not just any set, but a set comprised of all the relevant PsycInfo descriptors for that IDEA. So, for example, if you were to look up the word "stress" in the PsycInfo thesaurus, you would be presented with these logical choices of descriptors (called, oddly, Subject Headings in here!) for this idea:
You would then select the ones you liked by clicking in the adjacent little boxes. Or, you could find out more about one of them by clicking on the hotlink. If you were to check boxes for Environmental Stress and Occupational Stress and Physiological Stress and Psychological Stress and Social Stress and Stress and Stress Management, for example, and then click on the little box to the right, 
, this set would appear in your Search History:
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A NOTE on "exploding": Exploding a descriptor also picks up any other descriptors that are narrower in scope. In this example with stress, all of the NARROWER terms are in the list already. Physiological stress, social stress, and so on, are all narrower than STRESS. |
Set #3 now represents all the material in PsycInfo on the idea of "stress." Now if you were to look up "gender" in the Thesaurus and do the same thing, you would end up with a Set #4 that represented that idea.
Once you have all the sets, you then simply type a search statement combining those sets, using the numbers. In this example, I would type: #3 and #4. Then, a set #5 would appear in your search history:
Using sets like this saves you ever having to retype a search to change it. Pretty nifty!
STUCK?
Need MORE HELP? Make an appointment for some individual assistance with your research. Call me, Gail Gradowski, at 554-5438.
This
page created and maintained by Gail Gradowski,
Reference Department,
Orradre Library, Santa
Clara University.
Last updated September 19, 2005.
after you have made your selections to return to the search screen.
