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Course & Subject Guides

Developmental Psychology - Greensburg Campus

This guide is for undergraduates doing research in the area of psychology, especially those enrolled in Psychology 0310: Developmental Psychology and Psychology 0311: Lifespan Development.

Psychology Databases

Tip from your librarians: Remember that subject headings included with an article will lead you to all articles labeled with that topic. You'll need to add date range or other filters to the results. You can also add other search terms after the text for the subject search in the search box. 
screenshot of abstract/details page with subject terms circled

PsycINFO

Keyword Searching:

Start at the Advanced Search screen, and search the keywords and phrases you generated from your topic sentence.

  • Use quotation marks for searching phrases: Ex: “clinical depression”
  • Combine search terms using AND to reduce and refine your results: Ex: “clinical depression” AND adolescent AND treatment
  • Watch for disciplinary terms or language, and use them as search terms: Ex: teenager = adolescent

Too many results?

  • Combine terms using AND to reduce and refine your results

Too few results?

  • Expand your results by either removing a search term
  • Use the wildcard * to find all variations of a word:  For example, adolescen* will find adolescent, adolescents, adolescence

Use the Search Options on the Advanced Search page of PsycINFO to limit results to specific characteristics, including:

  • Record Type: Narrow results to books, book chapters and other publication types
  • Methodology: Limit results to a specific study method
  • Age group: Limit results to a study population age group
  • Population: Limit results to a specific study population

screenshot of search options for psycinfo

Pay attention to the type of resource, book, article, chapter, etc. They will all have different levels of access (full-text or citation) and may need further searching in PittCat to locate the source.

  • For a book result, use PittCat to search our collections. 
  • For a journal result, click the Available Online link. This will search for the full-text of the article. Clicking the article title from the results list will take you to the item record where you can select online source if one is available. 
    • If it is not found easily, you can use the Journal Finder link (under the Collections drop-down menu on the library homepage) to search for the title of the journal.  Once you find the journal and date range you are looking for you will then select the year, issue, volume, and title of the article and save appropriately.
  • If you cannot find the journal or journal article you are looking for, you can request a copy of the journal article from another library through Interlibrary Loan.