Skip to Main Content

PSY 230L: Stats/Methods I Lab - Malone

Workshop focusing on PsycINFO and evaluation of sources

Welcome

Welcome PSY 230 students.
The purpose of this guide is to introduce you to the PsycInfo database. Compared with the popular Google search tool, which emphasizes simplicity, the PsycInfo database is designed for precision. The designers of PsycInfo achieve that goal with the following features--
  • search indexes
  • limits
  • sorting
  • a thesaurus of subject terms
  • cited reference searching

And, features within the platform include linking to full-text, generation of citations, and saving articles for your needs. We'll go through all of them here.

About American Psychological Assocation's PsycInfo Database

The PsycInfo database offers citations from professional psychology journals as far back as the 1860s. Helping the researcher build on past knowledge has been a major goal.

There are over 5,000,000 records from 2,300 scholarly journals indexed in APA PsycInfo. 

Psychology journals

Livingston Lord Library has a large collection of psychology journals. You can browse our collection using the tool Browzine.  But an index tool like PsycInfo will let you search all of these journals--current and backfile--at one time.  You should try both tools.

Database and Platform

Livingston Lord Library offers access to PsycInfo database on the EBSCOhost platform.

It's important to know in case you hear those words used interchangeably. But the distinction is that the database is created by American Psychological Association and they dictate what is searchable. The platform runs the database and adds on features such as linking you to full-text, saving searches or records, sharing records, generating citations or exporting citations to a citation manager such as Refworks or Zotero.