Library Guides: Psychology Research Guide: Advanced Search Techniques

Finding Databases by Subject

Starting from the library homepage, lib.montana.edu,
Click Find
Click Articles & Research Databases
Click the All Subjects drop down menu to filter by subject.
Choose your subject. A list of suggested databases will appear.
Select a database to start searching in, then enter keywords – if there are multiple search boxes, enter one keyword per box.

The video shows the same steps outlined above. This is in place of a transcript, because there are no spoken words in the video.

Choose a database
Enter keywords to search. Example: Dogs AND (Depression OR anxiety)
Filter by peer-reviewed articles, by subject, date, etc.
Download the PDF of articles with full text access
OR, Click Check MSU availability to check if we have access elsewhere
1. If we do have access, download the PDF
2. OR, Click Request it! and the library will try to get a free copy from another library

The video shows the same steps outlined above. This is in place of a transcript, because there are no spoken words in the video.

Boolean operators are words you use to link your search terms together when searching for resources.

Use them to increase or decrease the number of search results to find what you need

Boolean Operator	Example	Reason to Use
AND	women AND military	Searches for items that talk about both concepts together, and to DECREASE RESULTS.
OR	women OR females	Searches for items that talk about either concept individually, and to INCREASE RESULTS.
NOT	women NOT men	To eliminate terms and concepts and to DECREASE RESULTS.

Use Truncation:

Using an asterisk * at the end of a word will search all endings of that word
Use when there are multiple possible search terms, starting with the same root( hospital* will search all of the following: hospital, hospitals, hospitalization, hospitality, etc.)

Find Like Terms with Subject Terms:

Scroll down on the full record for the book you've found to the subject term fields.
You can click on these subject terms to find more on-topic items.
In Academic Search Complete and other databases, you can generally click on the subject term from the item’s full record to pull up a list of all of the items in the database that have been labeled with that subject term.

Instructor Resources for Teaching Research
Lesson plans, activities, suggested tutorials, and handouts for each part of the research process. Resources are included for both in person, and online asynchronous classes.