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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 question: What are the side effects of antipsychotic drugs when used by patients with schizophrenia?
We'll start by breaking that question into its core concepts: schizophrenia and side effects of antipsychotic drugs.
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 will find the most relevant research.
Our PsycINFO indexers also indicate whether a term is major or minor.
A major term indicates that the article is primarily about that topic.
Choosing major concept will limit the results to just those that have "schizophrenia" as a major term.
When you click the "Add" button, you see that this is added to the search box at the top of the screen.
You could run a search for just that term, but let's continue building our search by adding the next concept, "antipsychotic drugs."
Note that our search for "antipsychotic drugs" indicates that the preferred term is "neuroleptic drugs."
Although different authors over different times may have used either term,
selecting the preferred term and adding it to our search will find all research on this topic, regardless of the original term used.
And this time, I'll click on the term to see the full record.
As you can see, you have the option of adding narrower, broader, and related terms.
Because these individual drugs are all relevant to our search, we may want to add them all.
We could click the box next to each term, but it's faster and easier to click the "explode" box.
With that "explode" box checked, clicking the "Add" button will add all of these terms to our search at once.
Finally, we'll add our third concept to this search.
Our question was not just about neuroleptic drugs, but more specifically, the side effects of those drugs.
So, let's try searching for "side effects" in the thesaurus.
We see two possibilities: "side effects (drug)" and "side effects (treatment)." We see two
In this search, we want "side effects (drug)."
Adding this term as a major concept completes our search.
What are the side effects of antipsychotic drugs when used by patients with schizophrenia?
Now we're ready to run this well-crafted search.
These results will be right on target for our research.
Because we took the time to craft this tailored search,
we might want to save it and/or set alerts to be notified when new research is added to the PsycINFO database that matches this search criteria.
Just click the "alert/save/share" button to get started.
For more search tips and strategies, please see our YouTube channel or the APA website. Thank you.