Understand PsycINFO Search Basics

PsycINFO uses many standard conventions for searching. Among the basics, are:

Boolean Operators: connecting words used to combine keywords

• And -- all words must be present in the results. Example: dogs and cats would produce results containing research with both words present.
• Or -- either word must be present in the results. Example: dogs or cats would produce results with either word in the results, but not necessarily both.
• Not -- excludes terms from the results. Example: animals not cats would produce results with animals in the results, but would remove every result which contains the word cats.

Wildcard and Truncation: Use the wildcard and truncation symbols to create searches where there are unknown characters, multiple spellings or various endings.

• Wildcard Searching: The wildcard is represented by a question mark (?). To use the wildcard, enter your search terms and replace each unknown character with a ?. PsycINFO finds all citations of that word with the ? replaced by a letter. For example, use ne?t to find all citations containing neat, nest or next. PsycINFO does not find net because the wildcard replaces a single character.
• Truncation Searching: Truncation is represented by an asterisk (*). To use truncation, enter the root of a search term and replace the ending with an *. PsycINFO finds all forms of that word. For example, use comput* to find the words computer, computing, computed, computes, etc.

Parenthesis: use parenthesis to group keywords together. If you don't use parenthesis, PsycINFO searches from left to right, in order. Words that are enclosed in parenthesis are searched first. Does it matter? Maybe. Words in parenthesis are searched first, and those results are searched against the rest of the query. For example: (anger or angry or angrier) and (driver or driving) and traffic accident would search first for articles with the keywords anger, angry or angrier. Those results would be searched for driver or driving. Finally, those results would be searched for traffic accident.

Quotation Marks: enclosing search terms in quotation marks forces PsycINFO to search for exact phrases. Be careful with quotation marks, as they tend to severely limit your results. For example, if you use the following "children with schizophrenia", you potentially won't have any results which include "schizophrenia in children".

Return to the PsycINFO Search Guide