Just the Facts

Coverage:  The American Psychological Association's (APA) renowned resource for abstracts of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations, is the largest resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health. Contains over 2.5 million citations and summaries from 1887 to the present.

Access:  UW only
This resource is restricted to the UW campus computer network. Remote access is available to UW faculty, staff, and students (more info on remote access).

Full-Text:  PsycINFO is not a full-text database.  Use Find It links to access online full-text or request a copy through Library Express.  An estimated 25% of full-text content is available through PsycARTICLES, the APA's full-text database.  Select "linked full-text" under limit your results to access full-text articles from PsycARTICLES.

Updates:  Updated weekly

PDA Info:  N/A

Publisher:  EBSCO

Creator:  American Psychological Association (APA)

Help & Tutorials

• Quick Guide  
• PsycINFO tutorial [Trinity Western University]
• PsycINFO tutorials [EBSCOhost]
• Quick Reference Guide PsycINFO on EBSCOhost [EBSCOhost]

For more info on this resource or any Ebling Library online resource, please use our Ask a Librarian form or call 608.262.2020.

Spotlight on PsycINFO

What is it?

The PsycINFO database contains more than 2.6 million citations and summaries of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations and technical reports, all in the field of psychology. It also includes information about psychological aspects in disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, sociology, education, pharmacology, physiology, linguistics, anthropology, business and law. Ninety-eight percent of the indexed material is peer-reviewed.  Journal coverage, which spans from 1887 to the present, includes international material selected from more than 2,200 periodicals in over 27 languages. The remaining indexed material consists of dissertations (starting in 1995) and relevant chapters from authored or edited books.

Are there other products like it?

There is some content overlap with the PubMed and CINAHL databases although their emphasis is on clinical aspects and research in psychiatry, and some psychology practice. The PsycARTICLES database is completely indexed and abstracted in PsychINFO.

The Web of Knowledge: (Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index) shares some journal overlap with PsycINFO, but allows a different searching objective through cited reference searches. Family Studies Abstracts and Social Sciences Full Text databases offer related articles and have some subject overlap

Special features

PsycINFO is indexed with controlled vocabulary from APA's Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms®.  We recommend that you consider comparing your search terms to the thesaurus of Subject Search Terms by checking the "Suggest Subject Terms" box above the search word entry box.
Save searches, create email alerts or set up RSS feeds by creating a MyEBSCOhost account (see http://www.library.wisc.edu/Q/ebscoweb.htm for more information).

Search Tips

If your search is returning too many results, note the "Narrow Results By" and "Limit Your Results" menus on either side of the search results.  Use these to narrow by source type (book, journal, etc.), subject, date, peer review, and more.

• Search for authors by entering: "Last name First initial" or "Last name First name"
• Use "*" to indicate a word or search term has been truncated.
• Use "?" to replace one character within a search term.
• The general HELP button is located in the top blue bar at the right scroll down the Index bar on the left until you find your help topic.