A Guide to PsycINFODr. Schuetze, PSY 450WWhat is PsycINFO?

PsycINFO is the online equivalent of Psychological Abstracts. This database is produced by the American Psychological Association. It covers over 1,900 international journals in more than 35 languages, from 1872 to the present.

What can I do with it?

You can use this database to find references and abstracts for professional and academic literature in psychology, medicine, psychiatry, nursing sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, social work, linguistics and other areas.

How do I get to it?

To get to PsycINFO:

1) Go to www.buffalostate.edu/library/

2) Click on the “Research” link towards the top of the page.

3) Click on “Find Articles”

4) In the “Databases by subject area”, select “psychology”. Click on “Go.”

5) Click on “PsycINFO.”

The main search screen for PsycINFO is made up of:

1) Search Box

2) Limits: allow you to limit your results to items that were published in a particular year, or published in English. Other limits are also available.

This example illustrates searching PsycINFO for articles on including an addict’s family in counseling for drug addiction. It is usually a good idea to look for different concepts one at a time, and link them using the Search History later on. The main concepts of this question are: drug addiction, family, and counseling. Type the first term – drug addiction – into the search box. Then click the “Search” button.

The results of the search are listed under “All Results”.

You will note there are too many citations to reasonably read through so it is necessary to enter a more specific search. Since family was another of the concepts of interest, that can be added to the Search by typing in “family” in the second search box. Since you are interested in both “drug addiction” and “family”, keep the word “and” as the modifier. Click “Search” and you will see that they are significantly fewer citations to look through.

You can continue narrowing the search by adding a third term if necessary.

Once you have identified a title that looks as if it might be of interest, you can scroll down the page to read through the abstract (a brief summary of the article/chapter). Note: PsycINFO does not include the fulltext of the article. We will discuss ways to find that later.

If the abstract sounds as though it will be a useful source, you can add this citation to a “folder” which contains only items you put there for further use. Once you have completed your PsycINFO search

session, you can click on the folder to review the items you have placed there. The contents of this folder can be printed, e-mailed or saved to a disk.

In some cases, there may be a link to the fulltext of the article within your citation. Clicking on this link will take you to the full article.

If there is no such link, the full text may still be available to you online. However, you will now have to go to the library home page and click on “Research”. From this menu, select “Databases”.