Psychology: Find Journal Articles

Starting with a keyword search in PsycInfo is a great way to see what's out there. If you want to perform more targeted, focused searches, there are a few general strategies you might find useful.

Advanced search limiters

PsycInfo searches upwards of 2,200 journals from psychology and the behavioral sciences. This means it can help to use the database's advanced search limiters to filter out search results and only leave you with the kinds of articles you know you want.

Here are some of the most popular limiters and how you might use them for this assignment:

• Peer Reviewed checkbox to ensure the article comes from a journal with a peer-review process
• Publication date slider lets you specify how old or how current you want the articles to be
• Age gives you the ability to ensure that a specific age range is at least represented in the sample
• Methodology set to "empirical study" to ensure you don't end up with a review article or some other type of source
• Tests & Measures allows you to limit your results to articles that used a specific instrument, scale, or measure

The image on the right shows where to find the different limiters and how you can use them to perform more targeted advanced searches.

Use the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms to generate additional keywords

The APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms lets you search for the controlled vocabulary used to tag individual articles. Another nice thesaurus feature is that it presents individual terms' place within a larger taxonomy of broader, narrower, and related concepts.