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Course & Subject Guides

Psychology of Health: Advanced Research Methods-Oakland Campus: PsycINFO

This guide is designed for students enrolled in PYS 1059 course, Topics in Advanced Research Methods: Psychology of Health

PsycINFO

PsycINFO, a major research tool used by professionals in the psychology field, covers content from 1806 – last month, and includes articles, book chapters, dissertations, and technical reports.

Using Search Options to Limit Results

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

Search Results

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. Go to Discovering PittCat+ for tips. (DO NOT use the check article availability link.)
  • For a journal result, click the Check Article Availability link. This will search for the full-text of the article. If it is not found easily, you can use the E-Journals link 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.

Starting Your Search

Keyword Searching:

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

(Click on image to enlarge)

  • 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