New Terms Added to the PsycINFO Thesaurus

By Ian Galloway, Senior Vocabulary Development Specialist

We recently released an update to The Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms, the source of the controlled vocabulary used in indexing PsycINFO and the other APA databases. All of the items included in APA databases – journal articles, books and book chapters, dissertations, and more – are represented by a record that is indexed, or tagged, with Index Terms from the Thesaurus. This allows someone searching a database to quickly find all of the items about a particular concept, such as Affirmative Therapy, Playfulness, or Transactional Leadership, no matter what terminology the authors used.

Keywords, Index Terms, and PsycINFO Classification Codes from a record in the PsycARTICLES database.

Keywords, Index Terms, and PsycINFO Classification Codes from a record in the PsycARTICLES database.

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PsycINFO Surpasses 4 Million Records!

We are pleased to announce that with the weekly update released on December 7, 2015, PsycINFO now contains more than 4 million records. The four millionth item indexed in PsycINFO was:

Szepsenwol, O., Simpson, J. A., Griskevicius, V., & Raby, K. L. (2015). The effect of unpredictable early childhood environments on parenting in adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(6), 1045-1067. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000032

For more information about this achievement, please see the press release.

Tutorial Thursday: Sample PsycINFO Search

It’s Tutorial Thursday! In this series, we explore APA’s extensive library of video tutorials, available on YouTube. Please feel free to link or embed videos or playlists in library websites or LibGuides, course management systems, or other locations where students, faculty, and researchers will find them.

Consistently some of our most frequently watched tutorials, our sample searches for PsycINFO have collectively seen more than 14,000 views in their lifetime – and for good reason. This tutorial provides a quick overview of how to turn a research question into a productive search strategy. Continue reading

Screenshot of slides from Beyond Subject Searching in PsycINFO

In Search of: Beyond Subject Searching in PsycINFO

APA’s training team provides a wide range of training options on an ongoing basis, including advanced webinars for librarians. This spring, we recorded these sessions and made them available on YouTube – a great option if you are unable to attend, want to share a session with colleagues, or find that the schedule doesn’t work for your time zone.

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