Starting December 20th, PsycINFO will no longer be available via SilverPlatter. The psychology database has been incorporated into the OVID suite of databases.
The PsycINFO database covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines including medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, and other areas. Coverage is worldwide, and includes references and abstracts to over 1,300 journals in more than 30 languages, and to book chapters and books in the English language. Over 50,000 references are added annually. Popular literature is excluded.
The database offers OVID mapping and the years of coverage run from 1887 to present.
Automatic Explode
PsycINFO does not use MeSH subject headings.ĘThe American Psychological Association publishes the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms that contains the controlled vocabulary of over 5,000 terms that are used when creating records for PsycINFO. This controlled vocabulary does not offer the same relationships compared to using MeSH, which is why the PsycINFO terms are automatically exploded.
By automatically exploding, both the quantity and precision of retrieval improves. The reason is that database producers index to the authors level of specificity. If you mapped to the term "EATING DISORDER" and automatic explode is DISABLED, you WILL NOT retrieve any documents about specific types of eating disorders, such as "ANOREXIA NERVOSA" or "BULIMIA." However, if automatic explode is enabled, all appropriate terms will be searched, including "ANOREXIA NERVOSA" and "BULIMIA." Therefore, automatically exploding all terms in running a search improves the search results.
Eating Disorders Hierarchy
The Focus option will give you the option to specify whether a mapped term is searched in all documents, or only those documents in which it was a primary subject.
Available Limits
Several limit options are available. These include: Tests & Measures, Disordered Populations and Non Disordered Populations among others. Disordered is defined as "psychological and physical disorders in humans, studied in the contexts of diagnosis, disorder characteristics, patient characteristics, or treatments."
In addition, more detailed limits are located on the bottom-half of the limits menu screen. Some of these include: intended audience, age groups and forms/content types.
Classification Codes
Another limit worth noting are the classification codes (CC). Classification codes are 4 digit numbers representing broad subject categories within the database such as "Learning and Motivation" or "Linguistics, Language and Speech." Searching the CC codes is a convenient way to limit an existing subject search to a particular setting or area (such as treatment or education). The codes are available in the limit menu or can be searched as keywords. For example, 3500.cc will search for all citations dealing with educational psychology.
The limits menu
Some of the searchable PsycINFO fields that can be used in searching include:
- AG (Age Group)
Examples:
Adulthood.ag
Infancy.ag
- CF (Conference Information)
- IA, AT (Intended audience)
General public.ia
Psychology professional research.ia
- IN (Author affliations-Institution)
- JN (Journal Name)
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