Following are some special tools for searching for articles related to psychology.  These can greatly enhance your power as a searcher, and ultimately save you a lot of time.  We won't have time to go over these in class today, but feel free to call or email me, or come by the research assistance desk, to learn how to do these.

• Special limiters - limit your search to empirical studies, human or animal populations, etc.
• Thesaurus - find out what terms PsycINFO actually uses in its subject field to make sure you're searching for the right ones.
• Author and Institutional Affiliation Searching - find out what your professors or other authors have published.
• Following citation trails - follow the research forward in time - who has continued the work of your author?
• Saving searches and records - so you don't have to redo them next time you use the database.
• Setting up alerts - have the databases automatically email you if new research has been published on your topic.
• Exporting records to RefWorks - citation software.

And while we will touch on these in class, don't forget about search techniques such as AND, OR, NOT, parentheses, quotation marks, and field searching.  For a review of these, see the DATABASE SEARCH TECHNIQUES tutorial.  You will need to have PowerPoint to open this tutorial.