PsycInfo: Subject Headings

What are Subject Headings? Databases such as PsycINFO use a thesaurus of standardised indexing terms to describe the content of each article; these terms are known as Subject Headings and in PsycINFO are based on the American Psychological Association’s Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. 

The database will try and match or ‘map’ your topic to the closest matching Subject Heading in their thesaurus.

Checking your term against the Subject Headings will:

•  Direct you to the preferred subject term that the database considers to be a best match for your term e.g. for group therapy PsycINFO will recommend the heading; group psychotherapy.
• Find all articles indexed under that subject heading regardless of the terminology used by the article authors e.g. the heading heart disorders also covers the terms; cardiac arrest, cardiac disorders, coronary heart disease and heart attacks.

You will need to combine terms using OR, AND in order to retrieve the most relevant results.

Use OR to combine terms which are similar this will widen a search and increase the number of articles retrieved.

Use AND to combine terms which are different, this will narrow and reduced the number of articles retrieved.

When searching by keyword, databases will usually only find the exact term you enter and not any plurals or variations. In order to make sure that all variants of a term are found a number of advanced search symbols can be used.

•  * is the truncation symbol, use to find all the various different endings of a term e.g. injur* will find injury, injuries, injured, injurious
• # is the wildcard symbol that will replace 1 character within a word e.g. organi#ation will find organisation and organization
• ? is the wildcard symbol that will replace 1 or 0 characters within a word e.g. behavio?r will find behaviour and behavior Wildcards can be useful for finding both British and American word variations.

It is not always necessary to use advanced searching techniques, only use when they make sense for the context of the question.

Databases collections can be huge (e.g. PsycINFO holds over 3.2 million individual records) and you need to be well prepared and specific about what information you want to find.

Plan your search before you start; what information do you want to find out? In this section we will use PsycINFO to search for articles to answer a specific question.

Look at the question below and ask, what are the key topics or concepts and how else may they be described? ‘The role of mindfulness based stress reduction therapy in the management of chronic pain’.

Remember -  Not all topics will have many or any variations or alternative terms.

Use your own professional knowledge and judgement to decide how in depth you want to go into the search process.

•  When thinking of terms, keep in mind that most databases are produced in America and use American terminology e.g. physical therapy rather than physiotherapy.
• You can’t just type the question into the search box as this is an unsystematic method of searching and would return too few relevant results.
• It can be very useful to look at the Library book stock before searching the databases, a good up to date text book on your chosen subject area can help familiarise you with the subject and with the terminology used by academic publications.

In the Advanced Search type in the first set of search terms beginning with chronic pain, as illustrated below.

Make sure that the Map Term to Subject Heading checkbox is ticked.

Click on Search. PsycINFO displays a list of terms, Subject Headings, which it considers to best match your search terms. Each heading is displayed in blue.

Click on Scope displayed to the right of the Heading to view further information, if available. Not every term will have a full scope note. For chronic pain only the date of entry as an indexing term is given.

Click on Previous Page to return to the list of Subject Headings.

The Subject Heading is highlighted, click on it to open up the subject heading thesaurus tree.

This is an alphabetical list of all the Subject Headings available.

Subject headings are assigned at a topic’s most specific level and can have related, broader and/or narrower subject headings within the tree. Not every term will have narrower headings.

In this example chronic pain has no narrower headings but is itself a narrower heading within the subjects of chronic illness and pain.

PsycINFO has also suggested some related terms that you may also want to consider.

The two boxes to the right of the number of articles found are the Explode and Focus options. If you select Explode it will include all the narrower subject headings (if available) for your term. In our example chronic pain has no narrower headings so cannot be exploded; pain has several narrower headings, so if explode is selected you will search for this main heading and all the narrower headings indented underneath.

PsycINFO auto explodes every heading so you will always need to check the thesaurus tree to make sure that you want to include all of the narrower terms.

You will need to repeat this process for all Subject Headings you use. I

f you don’t check the thesaurus you may be missing vital additional terms. Selecting the Focus box will only return articles in which your chosen Subject Heading is the main subject within the article. This is a limiter and should be used with caution at advanced searching level.

Click on Continue to carry out the search. The details of the search and the number of articles found will be recorded in the Search History part of the screen, to open the panel click on Search History.

As you progress each search will be recorded in the Search History panel.

Repeat the process with the next term musculoskeletal pain. This time none of the Subject Headings seem appropriate so we will need to use the search as Keyword option at the bottom of the Subject Heading suggestions. Select and then click on Continue.

The search history panel will now show 2 searches.

mp. (multi-purpose) after a term denotes it is a keyword search,

/ that the Subject Heading has been used and exp that a term has been exploded.

Each of these three searches is related to the chronic pain aspect of your topic. You now need to combine these searches to create one set of results containing all the records together. In the Search History panel of the screen tick the check boxes beside each search set and click on Combine Selections with OR.