Using PsycINFO

PsycINFO is an electronic database of psychological journal articles. While the internet and other sources have a wide variety of good information on psychology, it is difficult for the novice to find and evaluate its appropriateness, therefore, PsycINFO is your best bet for quality psychological information. 

If you are doing this from an off-campus computer, go here first.

You need to go to the library's electronic resource webpage.

click on On a Topic or Subject (in a Database)

Now, in the left hand drop-down menu (Databases by Field of Study) select psychology.

On this next page, select PsycINFO.

Now you are into PsycINFO and you can search on any topic (search tips and information are at the bottom of the page). You will get many, many 'hits' on your search. Start reading the abstracts. THIS IS NOT THE ARTICLE. Only a summary of the article.  Some articles will be available on line through a button that says 'full text'.  MOST will NOT be available this way, and you will need to get the actual article at the library (see below).  Narrow down your search if necessary. After playing around with this database you will get better and better at running useful searches. You can email yourself abstracts and citation information. Some title may have full text access. Many won't.
You should NEVER write papers based solely on abstracts. Therefore, you need to find references that we have in our library, or start early and do interlibrary loan. At the end of each abstract there is a button that says "check holdings" this tells you whether or not we have that journal in our library. if we do not, ONLY then should you use interlibrary loan. You waste your time and library staff's time by placing an interlibrary loan request for something we have. You may not use dissertations as references.