Performing an Advanced Search

You may perform a very basic search in Advanced Search.  It is not necessary to do anything except fill in the Find box. However, there are many options that will help you focus your search so you only the most useful items. We will consider those choices now, before we apply them to searching.

Advanced Search offers a number of helpful features, such as:

Advanced Search in PsycINFO offers many more options for refining a search than those available in Basic Search. For an explanation of most of the limiters that are available and how they function, see the list below. We will not try all of them in this tutorial, but you might want to experiment with them on your own.

When setting limits in Advanced Search, you may select more than one category in each drop-down menu by holding down the Control Key while you click. 

The following information about selected limiters that are available in PsycINFO might assist you in determining which ones could be useful to you.

Linked Full Text: Selecting this limiter will cause you to retrieve only the citations that include a link to the complete text of the article. To access the text, click on the link that looks like this: Linked Full Text  

References Available: This limiter will restrict your "hits" to items that have a list of references that you may access. Most of the items in the database do provide a retrievable list of references, even when the full text of the article is not available.

Publication Name: This limit applies to basic or advanced searching. You may enter a specific title of a periodical and search for articles on a specific topic only in that publication. 

Publication Year: PsycINFO covers publications from 1887 on, so you may select the year or span of years that is appropriate for your research. 

Published Date: If you know the month or approximate time of the year that a particular article was published, you may enter the appropriate range of dates in this area. You may use this option to limit to a more specific time period than is possible in “Publication Year.” 

Peer Reviewed: This limits the search to articles that are scholarly and have gone through a strict review process by authorities in the field.

Population Group: You may eliminate studies done on populations that do not apply to your research. For instance, you may eliminate studies performed on animals, if you are interested only in research on humans.

Age Groups: You may limit to subjects from one or more specific age groups, from "neonatal" to "very old - 85 yrs and older."Publication Type: You may select citations for the types of literature that that you would like to use, which will eliminate unnecessary citations. When you select "All Books" you will access citations for authored or edited books, as well as book chapters. There are three choices for journals:
                
             "All Journals" includes all scholarly and non-scholarly magazine and journal articles.
             "Journal" refers to non-scholarly magazine and journal articles. 
             "Peer-reviewed" Journal" refers to articles that have been evaluated by scholars in a particular discipline.    

 Language: You may select one or more languages from the menu, or you may scroll to the end of the list and put a check in the box next 
 to English.

Titles owned by King's College: This will access only citations for books or articles that are available in King's College Library.  Please keep in mind that this limiter will eliminate records for items that are held at other local libraries, and it will also eliminate records that might have linked full text. 

Click the image above to try an exercise!

Please click on "Searching by Subject or Author" below to discover how these searches may be used.

Introduction | Performing a Basic Search | Using the Thesaurus | Performing an Advanced Search | Searching by Subject or Author | Understanding the Citations | Using the Catalog | Using Interlibrary Loan | Glossary