 In this tutorial, you will learn how to harness the powerful features of the Ovid PsychInfo search engine to efficiently locate the best articles on your topic. We'll cover breaking your search down into component pieces and how to search for each piece using PsychInfo's official terminology and limits as well as how to combine your search terms using and and or. PsychInfo is a database that features millions of scholarly records devoted to the behavioral sciences including psychology, psychiatry, family social science, social work, and education. PsychInfo has breadth and depth, which can make it particularly difficult to search if you don't know the tricks. Searching PsychInfo as you would Google Scholar or Academic Search Premier is unlikely to help you find articles you need for your work. While it may be initially confusing, once you've mastered a few simple techniques, you will be able to quickly and easily identify the best articles on your topic. One unique feature of PsychInfo is the ability to search for articles using a controlled vocabulary. A controlled vocabulary term searches for the concept rather than the exact word. When you enter a search term into PsychInfo, you will have an option in black text to search for the term as a keyword as well as options for controlled vocabulary in blue text. More often than not, you will want to use the controlled vocabulary term in blue. If you aren't sure what a term means, use the scope or the little I button to get a definition of the term. If you're concerned that your search term is too broad or too narrow, use the auto-explode feature to search for any terms underneath your search term in the controlled vocabulary. An explodable term is a general term that has more specific terms index underneath it. Unlike databases like Academic Search Premier or Google Scholar where you enter your search terms into one box, PsychInfo uses a multiple-step set-based search where you search each of your terms separately, then combine your search terms with Boolean operators and an OR. Use AND to narrow your search by combining separate concepts. Use OR to broaden your search by entering synonyms or similar terms. Now that you are armed with the unique features of PsychInfo, let's do an example search to see how everything works together. Let's say we are interested in learning about the impact of therapy on teenage girls with depression. As there are many types of therapy, we are focusing on cognitive behavior therapy. First, it may be helpful to break your thoughts into the following pieces. What is the problem? What is the population? What is the intervention or treatment? And what do we want to know or measure? After you have broken your topic into these questions or component pieces, you will run a search for each component separately and then combine them. Let's enter our first term, depression, into the search box. Make sure to select the map term to subject heading box, then select search. Notice that depression gives us a long list of types of depression, including depression, emotion and major depression. Most of the terms listed are controlled vocabulary terms. Let's choose major depression and also select the auto-explode box where we can automatically search most of the other kinds of depression as well. Next, we'll search for the term treatment effectiveness. Our search term treatment effectiveness leads us to multiple examples. Let's select treatment effectiveness evaluation, but then do a separate search for treatment outcomes in order to broaden the search results. Next, we'll search for the term cognitive behavioral therapy. Now that we've searched for the terms depression, treatment effectiveness evaluation, treatment outcomes and cognitive behavior therapy, we're now ready to start combining our search terms. First, since treatment effectiveness evaluation and treatment outcome are related to each other, let's combine them using or. By combining terms together with an or, we can retrieve articles about either treatment effectiveness evaluation or about treatment outcomes in one search. Next, we will combine the treatment effectiveness evaluation or treatment outcome results with the other two sets of results. And for this search, we will combine the sets using and. When we combine the sets together using and, we only retrieve those articles that include all of the terms. We now have a search about cognitive behavior therapy and depression and treatment effectiveness evaluation or treatment outcome. What is missing from the search is the term adolescent females. To enter this component of the search, we want to use the limits feature. In psych info, we often need to use limits to define our population. We can retrieve those by selecting limits, which is below the search box. Once we have accessed the limits, we want to select additional limits. Let's choose adolescents from the age groups column and female from the population groups column. Finally, we can limit the search to all journals and to English language. Apply the limits by selecting the limit a search button. This takes us to a nice manageable set of relevant articles. We can choose individual articles or select all by checking the boxes to the left of the title of the articles. Once we have selected the articles we want to view, we could choose keep selected. Psych info is a useful tool for research, but can be tricky learning how to use it. By breaking your research questions into components, searching each of those terms and then combining a search is an effective way to use this database.