PsycINFO covers national and international psychology and the psychological aspects of related disciplines written in 25 languages since 1887. Some of the related fields are: anthropology, business, education, law, linguistics, medicine, nursing, pharmacology, physiology, psychiatry, social work, sociology, and others. Updated monthly, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), this abstracting service provides access points to more than two million citations. About twenty percent of the citations link to the online full text articles. PsycINFO is available to current UT Arlington faculty and students at this web address:

http://eresource.uta.edu/cgi-bin/db-psycinfoebsco.cgi

A truncation symbol in PsycINFO is an asterisk (*). When this symbol is put at the end of a word, the database will be searched for all of the possible endings--suffixes--for that word. For example, the command "homeless*" will have the computer search engine look for both "homeless" and "homelessness" and any other possible ending for that word.

Two Boolean operators that are important in finding information are AND and OR. The AND is used to connect two different concepts and the OR is used between concepts that are synonymous. It is critical to put parentheses around a search expression that contains an OR. Here is an example:

(women+ OR woman+) AND ("child abuse" OR "child sexual abuse")

The first part of this statement will find material about females. The second part will look for the phrases "child abuse" or "child sexual abuse". The AND then links the first set with the second. This might be an effective way to look for information about female child abuse survivors.

John Dillard, Social Sciences Librarian
dillard@uta.edu
cell: (817) 675-8962 - - office: (817) 272-7518