Keyword searching is easy but imprecise. Examples below show ways to improve your searches.
Basic keyword search
EXAMPLE SEARCH: How can nutrition effect stress in women?
Modify your search with AND, OR and Asterisk
AND: Add different ideas together with AND to focus your search. Example – stress and nutrition
OR: Add synonyms together with OR to expand your search Example – nutrition or diet or food or eating
Truncation * : Use an asterisk * as a truncation (also called wildcard) to expand your search and to replace letter for different spellings.
1. Check your spelling: Google your keywords to make sure you spelled them correctly. PsycInfo will not work if your keywords aren’t spelled correctly.
2. Too many results? Add keywords to focus your results: Do you have 10 000 articles in your search results? Add more search terms to focus your search.
For example, if you tried learning disability, you might focus on a group of people (toddlers), a specific issue (reading), and/or an intervention (intensive one-to-one tutoring). Check your course notes or look at your current search results for more ideas on focusing your search.
3. Too few results? Take keywords away to broaden your search
4. Try subject heading: Using the database’s own vocabulary (subject headings) can often vastly improve your search. Check out the Subject Heading Searching tab or ask a librarian for help if needed.
Quick Info
To find primary and secondary resources, you usually have to use Boolean Operators. These Boolean Operators include AND, OR, NOT.
Search Tips
Use keywords found during your background research and combine them using AND, OR, NOT:
AND - The AND operator is used to narrow a search or to make it more specific. Example search: apples AND oranges. Items that contain BOTH terms will be found. Items that contain just apples, or just oranges, will not.
OR - The OR operator is an inclusive operator. Example search: apples OR oranges. Basically, the opposite of the above. Use OR to combine synonyms or variant terms for the same concept, such as oranges OR tangerines OR clementines.
NOT - The NOT operator is also used to narrow a search but it is done by exclusion. Example search: apples NOT oranges. The result is items that contain the word "apples", but eliminates items that contain the word "oranges". The NOT operator can eliminate items with useful information, however, because it does not weigh the significance of the occurrence of the word. If the item is primarily about apples and only mentions oranges incidentally, the item will not be retrieved. The NOT operator should be used with caution.
[Adapted from Cal Poly Ponoma library]
Watch a short video about Boolean Searching, created by the University of South Florida Polytechnic
Keyword Searching: Keyword searching is essentially taking your best guess at the terms which will appear in articles that are about your topic. This can be a very effective way of searching.
The database will search for your keyword in the title, abstract, and subjects headings for each article all the journals in the PsycINFO database. You may get a number of irrelevant results because the keywords you chose may appear in irrelevant articles. You also never know if you've found all the article on your topic. Subject Heading searching can help deal with these problems.
Subject Heading Searching: Subject Headings are the controlled vocabulary (or tags) used within a database to organize material. If you can find the right descriptors for your topic, you can focus your search on relevant articles and be sure that you've found everything on your topic.
Using the Thesaurus will allow you only to search the Subject Headings (not the abstract or title) and you can search for the term that the database indexers have assigned to that subject. Always search one topic at a time to build your search (read Tips on Subject Heading Searches for instructions)
