Figure 2.6 Screenshot of Suggested Subject Terms in PsycINFO
Source: PsycINFO®.
Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms
A thesaurus of index terms can be useful to students in selecting the most effective keyword to search the literature on a given topic. The thesaurus is usually arranged in such a way that if you look up a particular term, you will see terms that are both broader and narrower. Often students initially enter keyword terms that either lead to “zero” hits or 1,000 hits; that is, the search leads to no or few relevant articles or so many that it would be overwhelming to sort through them. If you look up the keyword “terrorism” in the PsycINFO database, for example, you will get more than 9,000 hits. A recent search consulting the thesaurus function of PsycINFO under “terrorism” showed the year the term was introduced to the tracking citation system (1982), a definition (Scope note), two broader terms “antisocial behavior” and “violent crime,” two narrower terms “bioterrorism” and “counterterrorism,” and a list of eight related terms in alphabetical order. Entering one of these terms, “Radical Movements,” into the PsycINFO keyword search function produced 502 hits, which is a more manageable place to start (if this is the direction you are heading).
Another way to manage the number of “hits” you have is to use the “Subject: Major Heading” listing. After you have entered “terrorism” as a search term, look over at the left-hand column of PsycINFO, which is labeled “Refine Results” and you will see several headings including “Limit to,” “Source Types,” and “Major Heading.” Under Subject: Major Heading, I saw terrorism, violence, war, posttraumatic stress disorder, emotional trauma, and disasters, each with the number of articles associated with that term. You may be interested in emotional trauma, which has far fewer references, by a factor of 10, than does terrorism. This kind of information is helpful in managing your search to avoid becoming overwhelmed. To become more adept at doing searches, you might want to work through a search exercise with a reference librarian.
At the very least, an indexing thesaurus or its online equivalent will give you other keywords to test out. Using the appropriate keyword is critical to accessing the published work in a given area. That is why becoming familiar with the Thesaurus function of the electronic database you are using is essential.
Other Techniques in Searching: Truncation and Times Cited
Scheduling a session with a staff member in your library can acquaint you with the tools that will maximize your search efforts. Library professionals are there to assist students, and not infrequently students find such staff members more approachable than the course professor. Some institutions have a designated library liaison for a department or group of departments. Course instructors can invite such staff members to class at the beginning of the semester to explain useful search techniques and how to set up special accounts, such as those used to borrow materials from other institutions (e.g., interlibrary loan, ILL). With that introduction to the library liaison in class, students may be more willing to follow up with individual appointments.
Figure 2.7 Graph in Scopus Showing Number of Documents Related to Search Term “Residence Hall” by Year
Source: Copyright © 2019 Elsevier.
Regarding maximizing search efforts, useful terms to understand are truncation, advanced searching, cited by, and analyze search results. In a database, a truncation tool, often an asterisk (*), may be added to the root of a word to capture multiple endings of the word. This approach will help you broaden your search to capture closely related words. MIT has a useful guide to using truncation (http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php? g=175963&p=1158679), and its website on this topic shows that using a truncation approach with the word “child*” could also produce childs, children, childrens, and childhood, all of which might be useful. An asterisk (*) is the truncation tool in PsycINFO. In Advanced Search (staying with PsycINFO as our platform), you have the opportunity to refine or limit your results. You could do so with many different parameters, including age groups, publication type, whether peer reviewed, methodology (you might be interested only in empirical studies), supplemental materials (e.g., 3-D modeling images), and so on.
A very useful function is the “times cited in this database” option (in PsycINFO) or “cited by” (in Scopus, another useful database). This option tells you what other published research (in that database) has cited the particular article you selected. This information is very helpful if you pick an article that may have been written 10 or more years ago and you want to see who has referenced it (and possibly does related work on it) recently. Scopus also has the nice feature of showing you the publication pattern in a particular topic, that is, how many articles dealing with a particular topic were published in a given year. In that way, you can see the ebb and flow of interest in a topic. For example, if you enter the search term “residence hall*” in Scopus, you see 860 documents (in June 2019). If you click on the option “analyze search results,” it will produce a graphic representation as well as a frequency count of the number of articles published on that topic (in this case, from 1855 to the present) (see Figure 2.7).
You can see that there was some interest through the 1970s and 1980s (related to the beginning interest in environment-behavior research), but that there has been a fairly steady increase in publication on the topic since the late 1990s. In 2014, 38 articles on this topic were published, but this was down from 44 in 2013. It will be interesting to see whether this area is declining in interest. In contrast, if you put in the search term “student anxiety” (June 2019), you get 22,591 “hits.” When you analyze the search results, you learn that 1,289 articles on the topic were published in 2014, with a dramatic increase of interest in the topic starting around the year 2000. Graphically, such information from Scopus shows the number of published resources that are available and the level of interest in the topic.
Other Databases and Indexes in the Social Sciences
It is important to be familiar with commonly used databases. Some of the most common databases and indexes in the social sciences are Academic OneFile, Web of Science, PsycINFO, Scopus, SocINDEX, Anthropology Plus, AnthroSource, and Science Direct. Often, under the heading Databases and Indexes, there is the option to access the list alphabetically or by subject. For example, in many library systems, if you click on “listed by subject” under Databases and Indexes (to find journal articles), a list of subject areas appears alphabetically (e.g., from Africana Studies to VAST: Academic Video Online). You can click on the subject area of interest (e.g., education, psychology, or sociology) and a list of the databases in that subject area appears. The other option is an alphabetical list of databases and indexes, for example, from A and ABI/Inform to W and WorldCat. If you don’t know the names of the databases typically used in your field, then the subject listing is a better starting point.
Google Scholar is a search engine that searches academic resources. The results of a search in Google Scholar should not be confused with the results of a search you would get from a general Google search (more on that soon), which would include public Web content. There is a link to Google Scholar on the Databases page of my institution’s electronic library resources, reflecting the fact that the library staff members think Google Scholar is an acceptable tool for scholarly work. There is some research suggesting that the results of a Google Scholar search produce citations as scholarly as those from an equivalent database search (Howland, 2010). Is Google Scholar recommended over