PSYC 211 - Statistics and Experimental Design 1: Home

Hi everyone. I'm Greg Szczyrbak, the Psychology Librarian. In this video, I explain how you can contact me or other librarians for additional assistance.

If you already know how to find and login to the PsycInfo database on the McNairy Library website, you can skip this one.

PsychInfo is a database produced by the American Psychological Association. In many ways it is THE premier resource for psychology literature. There are other places to find psychology literature, but it is a great first place to start. We start with just one keyword. In subsequent videos we build on this.

Even though I like to start with just one word or phrase, I almost always build on that by adding additional keywords. This video explores the effect of adding keywords. This is a great place to get help from a librarian. Sometimes it is really difficult to figure out what to type in to get relevant results. Librarians have lots of practice with this and can help a great deal. I also encourage you to just be tenacious. Keep trying, but don't get frustrated. Talk to me before you get to that point.

Beyond simply adding keywords, databases offer additional methods to refine and focus your results.  Two very popular options are to use the publication date and the source type. This video demonstrates those methods.

Subject Headings are great way to focus in on a particular topic and eliminate the 'noise' of unrelated topics. PsychInfo also has additional fields to help refine your results based on the type of study, what measures were used in the study, and the characteristics of the population studied, included the age group.

This video is about retrieving articles that are available in PDF full text, as well as using Find it at Millersville for articles available through Millersville in other databases and Request It to obtain articles from other libraries.

Beyond keyword searching and other limiters, we can also search in other fields such as searching by authors. Paying attention to the author and the references helps to center the article as part of a scholarly conversation. 

PsycInfo a great place to start, but at times you will almost certainly need to expand your searching to include other resources. Not all Psychology journals are indexed in PsycInfo. Library Search which is found on the McNairy LIbrary homepage casts a wide net, searching many resources including disciplinary databases from many fields and our library book catalog.