Psychology

PsycINFO has several powerful features to help you find relevant articles, book chapters, and dissertations for your assignments.

• Refining Search Results
• Limiters
• The Thesaurus

These features are explained more fully below.

Getting started:

• Do basic searching by adding keywords to the boxes, with one concept per box.
• After your initial search, use the Refine Results options on the left to get better results.

For example, searching for gender gives you nearly 200,000 hits, most of which happen to mention gender but don't actually focus on it.

On the left you can narrow these results by subject — what you really want, and what the articles will actually be about.

Human Sex Differences may be closest to what you're looking for, so click on it.

This gives you new results, as well as more subjects to choose from. If you click on Stereotyped Attitudes from the next list, you end up with 875 focused results.

Keep in mind that Human Sex Differences is still part of your search.

If you're more interested in just Stereotyped Behavior, click the small X next to Human Sex Differences to remove it (this is in the upper left corner of the results list). Your results increase to over 2,000.

On the Advanced Search page, you can specify your search in several useful ways:

• Methodologies: Find studies using specific kinds of methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative.
  
• Age Groups: Search for studies on particular age groups. Choose multiple groups by holding down CTRL and clicking.
  
• Research Subjects: Find items that have human, animal, male, female, inpatient, or outpatient research subjects.
  

Other helpful limiters include:

• Language (to get results only in English)
• Date
• Publication Type
• Document Type

Searching by keyword usually gives you something, but the results may be overwhelming or imprecise, even with limiters and narrowing your results.

Increase their relevancy and usefulness by using the thesaurus as shown in this video.