To search for phrases ~
Put them in quotation marks.
Examples :
“sexual addiction”
“combat sports”
Phrase searching should be limited to short common phrases or phrases that are Official Descriptors in the PsycInfo Thesaurus
Examples:
BAD ~ "arousal in men versus women"
GOOD ~ arousal and men and women
arousal and “human sex differences”
BAD ~ "What causes nightmares"
GOOD ~ nightmare* and (cause or onset)
·Brainstorming Keywords
Take some time to think about the event or issue you have chosen. Brainstorm, with pen and paper, keywords that you think might lead you to articles related to your topic. Then further brainstorm to come up with synonyms or alternate terms that might work
· Combining Terms Using Boolean Operators
You need to use operators to combine terms.
You cannot just type in a string of terms.
Example: children dreams nightmares - will not work. If you just search for terms in a string with no connectors, PsycInfo will search them as a phrase.
· AND ~ Combining terms with AND means that both terms must appear in each result.
Example: sex AND addiction
· OR ~ Combining terms with OR means that only one of the terms must appear in the article. It is away to look for synonyms or alternate terms.
Example: sports OR athletics
· NOT ~ Combining terms with NOT means that the terms preceding NOT will be in the result, but all results containing the second word will be eliminated.
Example: depression NOT suicide
Even if you use AND /OR as connectors, you still have to create a search statement that works.
You must create sets using parentheses or Search boxes.
Examples:
Incorrect: Children AND dreams OR nightmares
This would retrieve all articles containing Children AND dreams and then all articles containing nightmares, regardless of whether they are about children or not.
Correct: Children AND (dreams OR nightmares)
Correct using Search Boxes instead of parentheses:
Truncation allows you to search for multiple forms of a word with one term. Examples:
athlet* = athlete, athletes, athletic, athletics
behavio* = behavior, behaviour, behavioral, behavioural, etc.
Beware of truncating too short - and getting irrelevant things, for example just psyc* would include too many words and all would not be related what you are doing for this course.