Psychology: PSY 223 (Delaney)

Controlled Subject Terms

PsycInfo formally tags articles about ACEs with the subject term "childhood adversity" but also suggests some options for more historical articles. This means you'll probably have more success if one of your search boxes contains a string like this:

"childhood adversity" OR "adverse childhood experiences" OR "early experience" OR "early childhood development"

PubMed and MEDLINE use MeSH terms, which advise you to use "adverse childhood experiences" as the subject term.

You can search for additional MeSH terms online.

Advanced Search Syntax

1. Boolean operators help you combine keywords and either broaden or narrow the search depending on what you want to find.

2. All three databases allow to conduct a phrase search by putting quotation marks around multiple search terms, which tells the database to return results that only contain those words next to each other and in that order.

"incarcerated parents" searches for that specific phrase and would return fewer, but hopefully more highly relevant, results than incarcerated parents

3. Each database allows you to truncate search terms by adding an asterisk ( * ), which will search all autocompleted versions of that word at the same time.

homeless* would return results that contain the word "homeless" or "homelessness," for example

4. Proximity searching allows you specify the maximum number of words that can appear in between your keywords, hopefully helping you find more relevant materials. For this strategy, the syntax does vary by database, though. In the following two examples, the search string only returns results where the word "parent" appears within 3 words of the word "incarcerated."

PsycInfo and MEDLINE: parent N3 incarcerated

PubMed: "parent incarcerated"[tiab:~3]