psychology resources blog

A current awareness resource for Psychology students & faculty members


5 PsycINFO Tips

Published by Yolanda Koscielski

As the fall 2015 semester is about to kick off, I wanted to share five PsycINFO tips for doing research and improving your searches.

  1. PlumX Metrics. Implemented in EBSCO in August 2015, Plum provides another way of gathering stats about an article. You can find out, for instance, usage info such as how many people have viewed the abstract, and citation information on what future articles have cited the article you're viewing. You can use the later stat to help find other related articles, much like the Times Cited in this Database link, also found in EBSCO. Plum captures metrics on usage, captures (example: article downloads), social media, mentions, and citations to the article. 
  2. Keywords vs Subject Headings. It can be a bit confusing to see that there are both subject headings and keywords used to describe the topic of an article. What's the difference?
  • For both, human indexers with some background in Psychology will assign keywords and subject headings, although machine-aided indexing will initially suggest both to get started. Ultimately, the individual indexer's judgment takes precedence.
  • Subject headings come from a finite vocabulary of terms used to describe subjects. This allows for articles about a single topic such as physicians to be described using a standard term (instead of doctors, GPs, etc.). You can browse the many different subject headings in PsycINFO by looking at its thesaurus. Indexers follow guidelines on applying subject headings in terms of number assigned, specificity of terms, and minor vs. major subject headings.
  • Keywords come from "natural language". In other words, all words can possibly be used. They are particularly helpful for describing emerging concepts - those that may be too new to have a dedicated subject heading created for them yet. Having said that, PsycINFO regularly asseses their subject headings to ensure the terminology is still relevant.
  1. Tests & Measures field: This part of a PsycINFO record lists which tests are discussed or used in the article. If there is also a DOI besides that test name, this means there is a record for it in the sister database, PsycTESTS. Tip: if you don't quite remember the name of a test, it is helpful to search PsycINFO just in the Tests and Measures field.
  2. Classification codes: This is a rarely-used search limit of PsycINFO. All articles in PsycINFO are assigned a broad classification code which describes their general topic area. Limit by classification code when you wish to do some context-specific searching. For example, a search for "putt", but limited to the classification code 3700 - Sports Psychology and Leisure, would return articles specifically in the domain of sports psychology. 
  3. Grant/Sponsorship field allows you to search by research funders. This field will become noteworthy as the new tri-council policy on funding begins to take effect in Canada. 
Blog Categories