PSYC 4250: Health Disparities: Psychological Perspectives & Solutions: Psychological & Economic Factors

Click the button above to be taken to a Guide on the Side tutorial that will teach you how to search in the PsycINFO database.

Click the button above to be taken to a Guide on the Side tutorial that will teach you how to search the Scopus database.

Search Joyner Library's collection of online materials. 

Use InterLibrary Loan and Document Delivery services to request articles, books, media, and more from other libraries when ECU libraries do not have what you need.

Keywords are:

• natural language terms that describe your topic
• able to be combined in any number of ways
• lacking consistency in usage, definition, and sometimes spelling (e.g. GERD vs. GORD[U.K.])
• either single words or phrases
• used to search for matching words or phrases anywhere in the records the database contains (such as title, abstract, journal title)
• used when no appropriate subject heading exists as an equivalent
• sometimes either too broad or too narrow, resulting in either too many or too few results
• reflective of recent phenomena in advance of when the subject headings are added

Subject Headings are:

• “controlled” vocabulary used by an organization (e.g. the National Library of Medicine) to describe the concepts in the literature collected by that organization or database (such as MEDLINE or CINAHL).
• Consistent in their definition across the records in the database.
• Less flexible and must be chosen from the thesaurus used by the database; if the incorrect subject heading is selected, none of the results will be relevant.
• Only searched for in the subject heading field of the record.
• Helpful for retrieving a set of articles with fewer irrelevant results
• Slow to change--this means that the most recent changes in knowledge--on diseases, drugs, devices, procedures, concepts--may not be reflected in the controlled vocabulary.

The simple answer to the question of whether you should use keywords or subject headings is: it depends. Some basic guidelines are:

• If the term or topic is very recent, keywords may be the best option
• If no Subject Heading exists for your term, or seems inadequate, use a keyword
• If the keyword is too vague or broad, a Subject Heading may help focus your search and eliminate too many results
  • e.g. neuroses would be a very broad keyword search
• If you want a very comprehensive literature search, you should use both a keyword and a subject heading
  • e.g. Heart attack OR Myocardial Infarction

To look for an exact phrase, use quotation marks (" ") around the keywords.

Example: 

Note: this works in most search engines as well. If you type an exact phrase without quotations when doing a basic search, most search engines will look for each word separately. In this example, quotation marks are not used, and the search results in every search term in green also being retrieved.

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The following are direct links to all of the subscription databases for ECU Libraries on the subject of Psychology.

The following are direct links to all of the subscription databases for ECU Libraries on the subject of EXSS.