PSY 290 Research Methods in Psychology

OR

Use OR to broaden your search. For example: "attachment behavior" OR "attachment disorder" will provide a list of results with either term.

NOT

Use NOT to narrow your results but beware! NOT eliminates all results containing a specific word, so be very careful using the NOT Boolean operator because you might unintentionally exclude records.

Example: (testimony OR witness+) NOT expert. 

Quotations

Use quotations " " to search for the exact phrase. For example: "stress scale" will not retrieve "perceived stress scale," "scaled of perceived stress," or any other variation. It will retrieve only "stress scale."

Tip* When using the ProQuest database platform that hosts both PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES you can also use curly brackets { } and the search will include spelling (humor v humour) and grammatical variants (tall will retrieve tallest) of the exact term. Example: compare "stress scale" with "{stress scale}" 

Nesting | Parentheses ( ) 

You can enclose search terms in parentheses to specify the order in which they are interpreted. Information within parentheses is read first, then information outside parentheses is read next. For example: 

memory AND (optimis* OR pessimis* AND personality)

The computer first searches for everything that has either optimis* OR  pessimis* AND personality. Then, from that pool of results, it will limit it to only those results that also include memory.

Truncation* 

Truncation means "to shorten" by removing the end of the word. The “*” replaces a word ending and will allow you to find all forms of a word root. For example: therap* will locate records with: therapy, therapies, therapist, therapists, therapeutic, therapeutically, etc.

In ProQuest, the "*" represents up to five characters within or at the end of a word. 

The question mark symbol (?) is the Wildcard character, used to replace any single character, either inside or at the end of the word.  One single ? will retrieve only one more character.

For example, searching gr?y would retrieve “grey” and “gray.”

**Note** Some databases use the # symbol for Wildcard searching. In this example, I am sharing what works for ProQuest (the vendor) that provides access to PsycINFO (the database).

Plural +

The "+" symbol instructs the database to search for words' plural and singular forms. For example, witness and witnesses: 

PRE/X: finds terms with X number of words between them, in the order they are entered in the search. 

NEAR/X: finds terms with X number of words between them, regardless of the order in which they occur. 

        Specifying NEAR/1 can be helpful for finding results that include specific phrases because the two terms are next to – or “one word away” from — each other.

        Increasing the proximity search limit to NEAR/2 will return records that have the search terms appearing within two words of each other (i.e., next to each other or separated by a single word between them). For example, searching for child* NEAR/2 trauma* {in Abstract field} AND experience {in Any Field} will retrieve records with useful variations due to both the word order and the truncation operator.

Matching search results for this proximity search would include (but aren’t limited to)

Experience of childhood trauma

Traumatic childhood experiences

Experience of children with traumatic [brain injuries]

Trauma on child [emotional health]

Trauma-exposed children

[Psychological] trauma for children

Children experience traumatic [stress]

Children after trauma

Children’s traumatic experiences