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Library Tutorial for Psychology
Section 8. Searching for journal articles using the PsycINFO database
PsycINFO is a database of psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. It contains records for articles in over 2,000 journals, as well as books, book chapters, technical reports, and dissertations. You can search for information using a range of options including:- Our first exercise involves finding references where you have incomplete information. 1. Bartholomew and Horowitz published an article on attachment styles in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The article starts on page 226. Here we don't know the title of the article, or the date of publication. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology commenced publication in 1965, and sitting with piles of journals checking page 226 in every volume doesn't appeal!! PsycINFO TO THE RESCUE!!Open PsycINFO by clicking on the link below - it will open in a new window, and you'll need to toggle between PsycINFO, and this window to complete the exercise
2. We want a second article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This one is by Simpson, and has the words "influence of attachment styles " in the title of the article.
3. The third article is a real problem. The title begins with "Adult romantic attachments". We can't decipher the name of the journal (this person's writing is dreadful), but it looks as if the first word is review. There's no date of publication either. Can PsycINFO find this one?
4. The next article we need is by Grabill and Kerns and starts on page 363. We presume it's on the same topic, but this is all we have to go on.
5. This next one looks relatively simple. We actually have the full title of the article, and it just happens that PsycINFO can look for exact titles of articles really easily. The title is Dispositional forgivesness and adult attachment styles.
6. The last article we need is the most challenging. Someone has spilt coffee all over the reference and the ink has run, However we can read the word Hollist (presumably an author), as well as the words midlife and marriage.
FINDING ADDITIONAL ARTICLESNow that we've found these six references how do we find additional articles on the topic? The easiest way is to use the links you see just below the article details for each reference. Times Cited in this Database tells you how many times this article has been cited by other articles in PsycINFO. This means that a number of more recent articles have listed this article in their references, and we can presume that at least some of them will be on a very similar topic.Simply click on the link to display the list. The Cited References link just lists the articles from the list of references at the end of the article. You'll also notice Subject: Major heading in the column on the left hand side of the screen. Underneath are listed terms from the PsycINFO thesaurus, and you can use these to do another search. So what's a thesaurus, and why is it useful? A thesaurus provides a standard language or set of terms with which to describe a subject area. Applied to indexing of a database, it shows a searcher which terms to use to retrieve the maximum number of relevant documents. If you can find a thesaurus term to fit your topic it makes your searching much more effective than if you just use your own words!! When searching for thesaurus terms in PsycINFO you need to put DE before the term, and if it's more than one word, use inverted commas around the phrase. Try the following thesaurus term search
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