Producer | American Psychological Association (United States) |
---|---|
History | 1967 to present |
Access | |
Providers | APA PsycNET and third-party vendors |
Cost | subscription |
Coverage | |
Disciplines | Psychology |
Record depth | Index & abstract |
Format coverage | Journal articles, books, dissertations |
Temporal coverage | 1887-present |
Geospatial coverage | Worldwide |
Update frequency | weekly |
Print edition | |
Print title | Psychological Abstracts |
Print title | 1927-2006 |
ISSN | 0033-2887 |
Links | |
PsycINFO is a database of abstracts of literature in the field of psychology. It is produced by the American Psychological Association and distributed on the association's APA PsycNET and through third-party vendors. It is the electronic version of the now-ceased Psychological Abstracts. In 2000, it absorbed PsycLIT which had been published on CD-ROM.
PsycINFO contains citations and summaries from the 19th century to the present of journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations.
The database, which is updated weekly, contained over 3.5 million records as of October 2013. Approximately 175,000 records were added to the database in 2012.
More than 2,540 peer-reviewed titles are included in the database, and they make up 78% of the overall content. Journals are included if they are archival, scholarly, peer-reviewed, and regularly published with titles, abstracts, and keywords in English. As of October 2013, over 1,700 journal titles were included in their entirety (i.e. "cover to cover"). Articles were selected for psychological relevance from the remaining titles.
Chapters from authored and edited books make up 11% of database, while entire authored and edited books make up 4% of the database. Books are selected if they are scholarly, professional, or research-based, English-language, published worldwide, and relevant to psychology.
Dissertations are selected from Dissertation Abstracts International (A and B), and make up 10% of database. They are selected on basis of classification in DAI in sections with psychological relevance. The database contains abstracts in dissertation records starting from 1995.
Publications from more than 49 countries are included, with journals in more than 27 languages, and non-English titles in Roman alphabets from 1978-present.
Each record contains a bibliographic citation, abstract, index terms from the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms, keywords, classification categories, population information, the geographical location of the research population, and cited references for journal articles, book chapters, and books, mainly from 2001 to present. Records of books include the book's table to contents.
These range from 1995 to present, and virtually 100% of records have abstracts (0.007% no abstracts). For non-dissertation documents added from 1967 to present, 99.2% contain abstracts.