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About this guide
PsycInfo is a database centered on psychology and the behavioral and social sciences. It is maintained by the American Psychological Association and contains nearly 4 million records, the majority of which are peer-reviewed journal articles.
This guide will introduce you to some basic and advanced searching methods in PsycInfo.
In addition to this link, you can also access PsycInfo from the library's homepage by clicking on Databases.
Basic Searching
The default settings will search for all terms appearing anywhere in article records.
- Enter your keywords. You can also use “quotation marks” around your terms to search for an exact phrase.
- Use the drop-down menu to search in a specific field, such as author, article title, and journal title.
- Separating terms with AND will search for all terms; alternatively, separate terms with OR to find any of the terms.
More Search Options
You can specify additional criteria using the search options farther down on the page. As you can see in the image below, there is an area where you can limit by publication date and restrict your results to articles that are published in peer reviewed journals.
As you continue to go down the page, you will see one of the most popular categories, Methodology, which, among other options, allows you to search for only articles that include an Empirical Study.
Many of these additional options can also be applied on the search results screen. You may want to see how many results you have on a basic search before adding many of these limiters.
