 By now, you've probably run a few searches in Psychinfo. You've learned how to enter keywords in just the search boxes and maybe some potential limiters to set to help you get nearer research. But you've probably noticed that you're running these keyword searches that your keywords need some refining, or the way in which the articles talk about your topic is a little bit different than the keywords that you've thought of. You can use a tool in Psychinfo to help you find more specific terms to use in your search. This tool is the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. You can find a link to the Thesaurus in the blue banner across the top of the Psychinfo database page. The Psychinfo Thesaurus helps you to pull together related terms and concepts that are about your specific topic. These are called index terms. APA regularly updates the Thesaurus to encompass new and changing topics within the literature. If you're new to your research area, you might not necessarily know the terms you search for. The Thesaurus can help you out. It sorts through these concepts and find the industry terms used for your topic area. And how is this done? APA indexers assign index terms, which are word entries in the Thesaurus that capture what an article is about, regardless of the terms that appears in the title, the abstract, or the text. This means you just need to know the idea you are searching for. Not all of the possible words the author may have used in their paper. Let's see an example. Say I wanted to search for a topic about pets. We can browse for this term within the index by typing in my keyword and clicking browse. You can see here that pets is displayed as one of the index terms. We can click on this check marks next to pets and add it to our search results. And it will pop that index term into my search box up here. Notice that the abbreviation DE has been assigned to my term pets. This stands for descriptor, which are the specific subject terms that APA has assigned to these articles. Additionally, you can also click into the index term found in the Thesaurus to see broader terms, related terms, or narrower terms. In my case, I see a broader term animals. I'm going to go ahead and click into the animal broader term and continue to browse the list of narrower terms or related terms. I see as I scroll down here through related terms that there's a concept of animal-assisted therapy. Given the fact that I'm researching the topic about how pets might help reduce stress in color students, the related term animal-assisted therapy might be a good term for me to use in my search. I'm going to check the box next to animal-assisted therapy and go ahead and click add again. And notice what it's doing to my search as I continue. My descriptor term pets is still there. And as I added my animal-assisted therapy term, I selected add with an OR search operator. So now my search is going to run a search for looking for the index term pets and an index term animal-assisted therapy. Let's go ahead and run our search now with these specific pathores terms entered into our search. One thing to note when you run a search directly from the Thesaurus is that it removes any limiters you may have had set, including the full text limiters. So before I go further, I'm going to put those full text limiters back. We're going to add print.gordan, full text in Epsco, and scarly peer-review journals. We had over 2,000 results when we first started and adding those limiters back drops our results down to 748, a much more manageable number. So now my terms at the top here are searching by descriptor terms, but remember an important concept of the question that I'm asking is about college students. So I'm going to add that keyword back in to my search as another part of my search. Now we're searching by index terms only pets or animal-assisted therapy and the term college student. And we're getting a much more narrow set of results from the terms I've entered. Let's jump down to result number four, therapy dogs on campus and take a look at where the index terms are appearing and where my keywords are appearing. Notice down here in my subjects, we have specific links and we see my index term that I entered animal-assisted therapy. What my search term here up at the top with the DE for descriptor is doing is only looking for terms within this subject line here. It's not looking at any other part of the article, not the abstract or the title or anything like that. It's only looking at that subject field there. That's why it's a much more narrower and sometimes more efficient way of searching. So use a thesaurus as a way for you to help learn how is your topic discussed in the literature. Click on the terms from the thesaurus to see narrower or related terms and add them to your search results using the check box and add button and continue searching for them.