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In this tutorial, I'll demonstrate how you can transform your research question into a productive search of the database.
First, let's look at our research questions:
“What treatments are available for migraine headaches?
And are there any side effects?”
We'll start by breaking our question into its core concepts:
treatment options,
migraine headaches,
and side effects .
First note that I have narrowed my database selection to just PsycINFO for this search.
We recommend starting a PsycINFO search with the thesaurus.
Because every record in the PsycINFO database is tagged with terms from the thesaurus,
using it ensures that you find the most relevant research.
That is, searching the thesaurus lets you focus on what your topics and core concepts are
rather than trying to guess what words an author may have used in titles and abstracts.
Let’s look at an example:
Our question is about treatment of migraine headaches,
so I could search for either word: "migraine" or "headache."
In this case, “migraine headaches” is a term in the thesaurus, so I’ll check the box next to it.
I also have the option to choose Major.
This means that for any research where they applied this term,
APA’s indexers noted not only that the term was applicable
but that it described the major focus of the research.
Now I’ll click the “Add to search” button,
which will bring us back to the Advanced Search page.
Moving to the next concept,
I want to look in the thesaurus for the concept of "treatment options."
There are many possibilities here, so I’ll click the term “Treatment”
to see what additional details I might find.
As you can see, “Treatment” has quite a large number of narrower terms.
I'm at the early stage of my research, so I don't know which of these options might be most applicable.
I could check the box next to each one,
but it’s easier and faster to click the Explode button on the “Treatment” line.
This will automatically include all of these narrower terms in my search.
When we run this search, these results will help us find answers to the first question:
“What treatments are available for migraine headaches?”
Finally, we wanted to know whether any of the treatment options had side effects.
Let’s modify our search, keeping the concepts of “treatment” and “migraine headache”
and adding the concept of "side effects."
I’ll select both “Side Effects (Drug)” and “Side Effects (Treatment)”
and combine these with “OR” so that we’ll see results for either one of these.
This gives us a manageable list of results that will be right on target.
“What treatments are available for migraine headaches?
And are there any side effects?”
Because we took the time to craft this tailored search,
we might want to save it or create alerts or RSS feeds
to be notified when new research is added to the PsycINFO database
that matches this search criteria.
Just click one of these buttons to get started.
For more search tips and strategies, please see our YouTube channel or the APA website. Thank you!