The APA’s definitive index of psychology and behavioral science.
At a Glance
| Publisher | American Psychological Association |
| Coverage | 5M+ bibliographic records across psychology, behavioral science, and mental health, back to the 1800s |
| Access | institutional subscription (via EBSCO, Ovid, or ProQuest) |
| Free alternative | PubMed (for the biomedical overlap), OpenAlex |
| Regional | global, English-dominant. |
Our Take
For anything psychology-adjacent, PsycINFO is the authoritative index — deeper and more precisely indexed in the discipline than PubMed or Scopus, with a controlled vocabulary (the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms) that makes precise searching possible. The catch is that it’s subscription-only and its power lives in that thesaurus, so keyword-only searching leaves a lot on the table. Use it as your primary index for psychology and behavioral research; pair with PubMed where the topic crosses into clinical medicine.
Power Tips
- Search the APA Thesaurus terms, not just keywords, for reproducible, complete results — the same discipline that pays off in PubMed’s MeSH
- export to Zotero and dedup against other databases with source tags intact for auditable review counts (Issue 3).
Alternatives & Complements
PubMed · Scopus · Web of Science · PsyArXiv.
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