PSY 201: Science of Psychology

Sample research question: Does positive psychology make people happier?

Database selected:  PsycInfo (see the Finding Articles page of this guide for additional database choices and how to search multiple databases at once).

Pull out the most important concepts in your research question (key words or phrases):  "Positive Psychology" and happier or happiness, or more general terms like effectiveness.  Put quotation marks around 2 or 3 word phrases to ensure they are searched as one concept.

You can use the second box on each line to select where you'd like your search term to appear, such as in the title. Leave it at "select a field" for the broadest search; it searches everywhere for your term.

Use AND to indicate you want terms in both boxes to show up in your results. You can use synonyms connected by OR to capture as many hits as possible.  The * symbol stands in for letters, so effective* will pull up effective or effectiveness.

For "con" articles, you could change the words in the second box to ineffective OR "not significant", etc.

Once you've brainstormed keywords for your research question, think about what operators you may use. Operators are a way of combining keywords to get the best results from your search.

Boolean Operators

  AND    Use AND when you want to find articles or other information that contains both/all keywords

         student AND secondary

  OR    Use OR when you want to find articles or other information that contains at least one of the keywords

          student OR learner

  NOT    Use NOT when you want to find articles or other information that does not have a certain keyword

           student NOT child

You can use Boolean Operators together to perform a very specific search.  You might want to use parentheses to group your keywords together:

          student OR learner NOT child

          AND secondary

 

Other Search Tricks:

Quotation Marks   Put quotes around phrases when you want that phrase to be found in that exact order

          "secondary student"

 

Wildcards   Use wildcards when there are unknown characters, multiple spellings, or endings.  Symbols for wildcards may differ, so check the Help in your databases to see what symbols they use. 

         ?        Replace a single character   

 

Truncation   Use truncation to find all forms of a word. Symbols for truncation may differ, so check the Help in your databases to see what symbols they use. 

         *       Learn* will find learn, learning, learner, learners

 

Note that Wildcards and truncation can NOT be combined in one keyword for your search

Combining Keywords, Operators, and Truncation creates a very specific search:

        "secondary learn*" OR "high school" NOT child

          AND yoga