PSYC-100: Introduction to Psychology

These articles report original research or studies (actual observations or experiments), rather than theoretical developments or methodological approaches. You can identify them in several ways:

• keywords: look for “study,” “empirical,” or mentions of participants, observations, methodology/measurements
• structure: usually includes introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections
• publication: should be in an academic or professional journal, rather than in popular magazines or newspapers

PsycInfo is a good place to start searching! This database contains scholarly journals in Psychology that publish empirical research articles.

Identify your concepts
When searching for a topic, first it's best to break it up into keywords according to the main concepts.
For example, if you're interested in the impact of social media on loneliness in teenagers, your keywords might be:

• social media
• loneliness
• teenagers

Generate more keywords
Next, you should think about other keywords that might also describe your topic. This helps make sure you don't miss relevant articles.

For example: teenagers could also be adolescents, young adults

Try it out! Fill in your major concepts and related keywords using the Search Strategies handout

Combine keywords to narrow or expand
Next, you can use the drop-downs with AND, OR, and NOT to tell the database to include or exclude various terms.

Social media AND loneliness will only retrieve articles with both terms, which creates a narrower search:

Teenagers OR adolescents will retrieve articles with either term, or both, which creates a broader search:

Summary: AND will narrow your search and OR will broaden it. NOT will exclude articles that include those keywords.

Subject terms

Subject Terms are tags that describe the major concepts that an article focuses on. They can be good tools for refining your search!

Subject terms in articles

You can find good subject terms by running a keyword search and then looking at individual article pages to see what they've been tagged with.

Subject drop-down

You can use the drop-downs next to your search boxes to search for Subject Terms instead of keywords anywhere.

Thesaurus

You can use the Thesaurus to look up Subject Terms and add them to your search. PsycINFO will also suggest Subject Terms if you toggle that option before searching:

Methodology filter

On the Advanced Search page, you can scroll down to Methodology and select EMPIRICAL STUDY to narrow your search: