Exploring PsycINFO

PsycINFO provides citations and abstracts for the literature of psychology and related disciplines, such as education, law, linguistics, medicine, neuroscience, nursing, psychiatry, and social work. Published by the American Psychological Association (APA), PsycINFO is only available by license. At UVM, PsycINFO is available via the ProQuest search platform.

In addition to citations to scholarly journal articles, PsycINFO includes citations to books, book chapters, dissertations & theses, and reports. Like MEDLINE, PsycINFO utilizes a controlled vocabulary (thesaurus) to facilitate searching. As an added bonus, many PsycINFO records include links for the author(s)' reference lists, as well as for citing articles.

In the following video, I'll demonstrate a typical search in PsycINFO, using bullying of LGBT youth as an example.

Here is the search strategy for this search:

(MAINSUBJECT.EXACT.EXPLODE("Bullying") OR noft(bullying)) AND (MAINSUBJECT.EXACT.EXPLODE("Homosexuality") OR noft(lgbt*))

As you see, the ProQuest platform uses its own unique syntax, which is quite different from that of other databases. But if you parse the search statement carefully, working methodically from left to right, it should all make sense.

1. First, we searched on the term "bullying", both as a subject heading from the thesaurus (MAINSUBJECT.EXACT.EXPLODE), and as a keyword (the code "noft" directs the system to search in All Fields of the database record, except not the full-text).
   
2. Second, we searched on the term "homosexuality" as a subject heading, and the keyword lgbt*.
3. Third, we combined sets 1 and 2, using the Boolean AND to bring up articles that cover both topics.
   

1. What is the default sorting in the PsycINFO database?

a) Source Journal

b) Times Cited

c) Date Oldest

d) Relevance

e) Author

f) Date Newest

2. True or False: PsycINFO covers only literature found in scholarly journal articles.

a) true

b) false

Dana Medical Library, University of Vermont

Burlington, VT, USA

(802) 656-2201

danaref@uvm.edu

http://dana.uvm.edu

1. d) Relevance

2. b) False. In addition to journal articles, PsycINFO includes citations to books, book chapters, dissertations & theses, and reports.