Introduction to PsycINFO

PsycINFO is the American Psychological Association's (APA) database covering behavioral science and mental health literature. It contains bibliographic information and abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations with over 3 million records going back as far as the 1600s.The Waters Library collection includes other databases to connect you with many of the full-text articles you find in PsycINFO.

Nurses and other health care professionals can use PsycINFO to find research on:

• behavioral aspects of health care delivery
• mental health literature
• psychological aspects of medicine, nursing, sociology, education, physiology, business, and law

On this page:

• Searching in PsycINFO
• Advanced Search Features
• Video Tutorials for Using PsycINFO

Searching in PsycINFO

To search effectively in PsycINFO, develop your research question before beginning your investigation in the database. If your search is vague and overly broad, your search will likely result in thousands of results, and many of these may not be related to your research question. Here are some tips for building effective searches.

• Keywords and phrases - Create a list of specific terms or phrases relevant to your topic. It may be helpful to write an initial research question based on your prior knowledge and reading you have already done. Once you have that list, brainstorm as many synonyms for those words as you can. Not all authors use the same words or spelling (for example: post-traumatic and posttraumatic, hemodialysis vs haemodialysis).
• Boolean operators - Using "and" "or" and "not"  can narrow or expand your results to make your search more effective.
  • "and" - Use "and" to narrow your search. For example searching for "stroke AND paralysis" tells the database to include only results that contain BOTH the words stroke and paralysis.
  • "or' - Using "or" will expand your results. "stroke OR "transient ischemic attacks" OR "ischemia" will include all results that have ANY of those 3 words.
  • "not" - Using "not" will narrow your results by excluding a word (or words) that you specifically to not want to include. For example, "stroke NOT brain injury"
• Quotation marks - Quotation marks tell the database you want the exact phrase in the same order as it appears in the quotation marks For example, "cerebrospinal microbleeds" will not return results that include only "cerebrospinal" or "microbleeds", but only those results that have both words in that order.

Advanced Search Features

Index Terms - What are they?

PsycINFO uses the APA Thesaurus to index terms. Index terms work like hashtags in social media.

• APA creates and maintains a list of index terms. These are the official list of terms for APA PsycINFO.
• Each article is assigned specific index terms based on its content.
• APA Thesaurus has over 10,000 terms related to psychology and behavioral sciences.

What do index terms do?

Index terms provide consistent terms that you can use to find articles, even when the authors may have used different terms in their paper. Using the APA Thesaurus to find index terms makes it easier to find all the resources related to a search. Index terms:

• Create a standardized set of terms for searching
• Create consistency to optimize searching
• Help researchers find complete results even when authors use varied terms, spellings, and when names for concepts change over time.

How do I use the APA Thesaurus?

From the APA Basic Search and Advanced Search pages, click on "APA Thesaurus". Then type in a keyword to get the index term(s) associated with your term(s). Pro-Tip: save your keywords, index terms, and combinations you use.

Is there anything the Index Terms can't do?

Some topics and/or concepts may not be covered by the APA Thesaurus. New technology, popular culture, history and other topics may not be covered. Search by using both index terms and keywords for the most complete results.

Video Tutorials for Using PsycINFO