How to use PsycINFO

PsycINFO is a nationwide database that has the abstracts and citations for all of the articles published in psychology journals, and book chapters publsihed. If you want to find what's been done on a specific topic, you can use psycINFO to provide a list of all the different experiments done on the topic. To use psycINFO, follow the instructions below.

To find the database:

  1. Go to the CSUS homepage.
  2. Click on the "resources and services" link
  3. click on the "library" link
  4. click on "databases and periodicals" link
  5. click on the "specific subjects" button on the left and highlight "Psychology"
  6. click on the "PsycINFO" link

You should now be at a webpage that has "Ebsco Host" at the top. This is the page from which you can request to see articles on a topic in psycINFO.

This main page has a number of features to help guide your search through the database of journal articles, and to help limit your search.

  1. The "Find" window is where you can type in any words to search for articles with those keywords. The keywords can be on a subject or topic (such as alcoholism or anorexia) or a particular researcher (such as Skinner or Chomsky -- anyone who has written an article that you may want to see). For example, if I wanted to see all the articles done on false memory for people's faces, I may type in the keywords "false memory and faces". (Note the database will look for articles that contain the phrase "false memory" and the word "faces". It needs the word"and" to separate different keywords).

The following are all ways to help narrow the results of your search. These are useful if you type in a couple keywords and get hundreds of articles found.

  1. The checkbox that says "CSUS subscribes to this journal" means that if you check the box it will only tell you about articles that CSUS has in the library.
  2. The "Publication Name" window allows you to type in a particular journal to search for articles in. If you type in "Perception & Psychophysics" it will only look for articles published in this journal.
  3. The "Population Group" button allows you to specify what population the articles are studying (animal, female, etc.)
  4. The "age groups" button allows you to look for experiments done on a particular age range (e.g. just studies done on infants between 2 and 23 months old)
  5. The "document type" button allows you to specify what type of publication you want to read (e.g. just book chapter or just journal articles).
  6. The "intended audience" button allows you to specify who the article was primarily written for (this is often less relevant for the psycINFO database since few are aimed at children).
  7. The "year of publication" windows are probably the most useful, because they allow you to specify a range for when articles were published. So if you wanted to just see the very most recent articles on a topic, you could type in Yr: 2001 to Yr: 2001, and just see articles published in 2001.

Once you have typed in keywords to search on a particular topic, click the "Search" button to the right of the "find" window. Note that if you want to search for two keywords you should type "and" inbetween them.

A list of the articles found will appear in a new webpage. You can click on the Title of an article to look at the abstract for each article on the list.

If you find an article that you like the look of, print out the page, or write down the information you'll need to locate the journal article in the library (1. the name of the journal, the title of the article, the authors, the year the article was published, the volume number of the journal, and the page numbers of the article). You can also e-mail the citation to yourself.

Some of the articles have full test copies that you can print out online, but for most articles you will have to go to the library and photocopy the article out of the bound journal book.

You can then search the Eureka Sac State library database to see if and where those particular journals are located in the library. Once you go to the location and find the journal, just photocopy the article so you can read and reference it later.