EDPY 262 - Community-Based Research Methods: PsycInfo

Why is PsycInfo worth getting to know?

1. More psychology articles than any other database.
2. Everything in it is relevant to psychology.
3. Updated weekly. (JSTOR may not have latest 3-5 years.)
4. It's the best way to search articles by method used (empirical, imaging, twin study, etc.).
5. It's the best way to search studies by test or measure used (MMPI, Beck Depression Inventory, etc.).
6. Find the first article published on a topic sorting by "Date Oldest." (Google Scholar can't be sorted by date.)
7. Every article is classified by subject. That means you get every article on a subject.
8. Created by the APA, it's the standard tool for psychologists.
9. BatesLink can take you to the full text article, or to an interlibrary loan request.

See these video tutorials for demonstrations of some of PsycInfo's advanced search techniques.

Let's try a PsycInfo search on the relationship between children's literature and children's development.

In the Advanced Search, we can put "children's literature" OR "picture books" OR "children's books" in the first line. The quotation marks will search for those exact phrases. The "OR" will give you results containing any one of those phrases.

On the second line, we can put development as a Subject Term to combine the two concepts.