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PsycINFO Help - UA Library

Table of Contents

• Basic Searching
• Search Hints
  • Searching
  • Expanding Your Search
  • Limiting to Scholarly Articles
  • Limiting to Empirical Studies
• Getting Your Articles
• Saving Articles

Basic Search

Identify your research topic, once you have done that, type your keywords in the search boxes. If you are uncertain about how to construct an effective search, take a look at the search hints.

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Search Hints

• Searching

  PsycINFO automatically searches words as a phrase. What this means is that if you type two words right next to each other, the database will only search for and retrieve articles that have those words right next to each other.

  For example, if I want to find articles about the portrayal of women in the movies and type women portrayal movies into a database search box, I will not find any articles because the database is searching for the exact phrase women portrayal movies.

  

  To find articles on my topic, I need to put the word and between each of my keywords. You can do this by typing each of your keywords into the different boxes in PsycINFO.

• Expanding Your Search

  This is a great way to get a lot of articles in one search. Use an asterisk (*) to match more than one letter. A search on bird* will find bird, birding, birdman, birds, and other words that start with bird.

• Limiting to Scholarly Articles

  PsycINFO allows the user to limit their searches to a particular publication type (like scholarly articles). Do this by checking the Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals box located a little ways down the page.

  
• Limiting to Empirical Studies

  Do this by scrolling down the page until you see the Methodology box. Once you are there, click on empirical studies.

  

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Getting Your Articles

Once you have your result list, you will be able to access your articles either by:

• Clicking on HTML Full Text, Linked Full Text or PDF - this will take you directly to the article.
• If you do not see one of the two options above, then click Check Article Linker for more information. In some cases, this will take you directly to the article (you may have to wait a minute while the article comes up). If clicking Article Linker does not take you directly to the article, follow the steps you see on the Article Linker information pop-up.

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Saving Your Article

Save articles that look like they will be useful by clicking the "add" folder.

Once you have saved all the articles that you want, click the folder link at the top of the page. From here you will be able to print, email, export or save the citations for the articles that you have located.

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Created by Leslie Sult and Justin Spargur, December 2006