PSY 201: General Psychology

Performing a Literature Search Using PsycINFO

What is PsychInfo?

PsycINFO is a search engine like Google or Yahoo that specifically searches for book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles published on topics studied by psychologists. You can access PsycINFO from any internet-ready computer on campus and from off-campus by logging on to the university’s library system using your student ID number found on your ID card.

How do I access PsycINFO?

1. Go to http://libraries.cua.edu/welcome.html using an internet browser, and click on ‘Aladin Web Page’ under the Research Tools section in the upper left-hand corner of the page.

2. In the lower right-hand portion of the screen, you will see a section labeled Databases by Subject. Click on the ‘Education/Psychology’ link in this section.

3. In the bottom left-hand corner of this page, you will see a line that says ‘PsycINFO (Psychology)’. Click on the link next to this that says ‘Connect’. This will take you to PsycINFO.

How do I use PsycINFO?

PsycINFO allows you to search the database based on a number of criteria. Like many search engines, you can search based on keywords dealing with your topic, authors’ names, the title of the journal, and a host of other criteria. Here are some ways to use PsycINFO:

1. Key words or phrases. Let’s say, for example, you have decided to do your paper on the hypothesis that soccer players have faster reflexes than hockey players. Two important words that might make a good basis for beginning your search might be ‘soccer’ and ‘hockey’. To perform a search on the keyword ‘soccer,’ simply enter ‘soccer’ into the field in the center of the screen labeled, “Enter Keyword or phase:”, and then click on the ‘Perform Search’ button to the right of the field.

If you follow this example, you will see that PsycINFO gives a range of keywords that are related to the word you entered. You can include some of these words in your search by clicking on the box next to each word that you want to be included in the search. You can have PsycINFO search for all of the articles in its database that mention either soccer or performance by clicking on both options and then choosing the ‘OR’ option in the pull-down window at the top of the screen. Alternatively, if you want to find only articles that mention both sports and performance as keywords, you should click on both boxes and then choose the ‘AND’ option in the pull-down window at the top of the screen.

When you have decided which of all the related search words you would like to use, click on the ‘Continue’ button at the top of the screen. PsycINFO will then search through all of the entries in its database and will present a page that displays all of the searches you have performed up to this point, with the number of articles that fit those criteria listed next to it. To view these articles, click on the blue ‘Display’ button next to the search listing. This will give you the citations for all of the articles it finds.

2. Authors. Perhaps you find one very good article on your topic by a particular author, and you would like to look up all of the articles written by that author to see if he or she has written anything else relevant to your topic. Click on the ‘Main Search Page’ button at the top of the screen, if you are not there already. This should bring you back to the original PsycINFO screen. To perform a search for a particular author, click on the ‘Author’ icon at the top left of the page. The text above the search field in the center of the screen will now say, “Enter the Author's last name, a space, and first initial if known:”. Follow these instructions, typing the last name of the author followed by the author’s first initial. For example, if I want to find articles written by Paul Ward, who I know has done research on soccer performance, I would type in ‘Ward P’.

PsycINFO will list all of the authors in its database, starting with the first author named P. Ward. In this case, there are many authors with the last name ‘Ward’ whose first names start with ‘P.’ However, we do not know Paul’s middle initial, so to make sure we get all of the articles written by Paul Ward, we might want to click on all entries that begin ‘ward p’ or that begin ‘ward paul’. This will give us a search listing that includes 38 articles written by people with the last name ‘Ward’ whose first initial is ‘P.’

3. Combining the results from different search listings. When we performed our author search above for Paul Ward, PsycINFO gave us a lot of listings for people other than Paul Ward because we did not know Paul’s middle initial. What we really want to know is how many articles were written by Paul Ward about soccer. PsycINFO can tell us this information if we use the ‘Combine’ function.

Go back to the main search page. To use the ‘Combine’ function, click on the icon at the top of the screen that says ‘Combine’ (the icon has overlapping yellow and blue circles). PsycINFO will then allow you to choose which of your previous search listings you would like to combine together. We want to combine the first two (the only two we have performed so far), so we should click on the box next to both listings and then click on the ‘Continue’ button at the top of the screen.

We now see that only one article was written by a P. Ward on soccer, which was the article we already knew about. This tells us that Paul Ward probably has not written any other psychology articles on soccer players.

What do I do once I find citations I might want?

Once PsycINFO has provided us with a list of citations that we think is focused enough to be useful, we probably will want to read a little bit about the article before we go to the library to try to find it. As an example, try looking up all of the articles by researcher Robert T. Knight of the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Knight is a neurologist who has done a lot of research on memory impairments in patients who have suffered brain damage or who have certain neurological conditions.

Let’s say that I am interested in reading more about the first article in this list entitled, ‘Neural origins of the P300’. Just below and to the right of this citation, I see in blue a link that says, ‘Abstract’. Clicking on this link will provide me with some of the details about this article, including a one-paragraph summary of the researchers’ hypothesis, the design of the study, and what the researchers found.

Let’s say that I find this particular article relevant to my paper, and I want to know which papers these authors thought were important enough to cite in their own work. The link next to the ‘Abstract’ link below the article entitled, ‘Complete Reference,’ will provide not only the abstract for the article, but also the keywords under which the article is listed in the database and the references for all of the articles the authors cited in their work.

In some instances, Catholic University will have on-line access to particular articles through an agreement with the American Psychological Association (APA). If a particular article is available in PDF format through PsycINFO, you will see a fourth link listed below and to the right of the citation for the article entitled, ‘Ovid Full Text.’ You can see an example of such a link under the second citation if you have found all of the articles for Robert T. Knight. If you click on the ‘Ovid Full Text’ link, a new page will pop up that provides all of the text and figures from the article. If you would prefer to see a PDF of the article formatted exactly the same way in which it was originally published, you can then go to the blue box on the right of the page and click on the blue link that says ‘Full text (PDF)’, followed by a number indicating the size of the PDF file. PDFs tend to be more printer friendly than the full-text versions of the articles.