PsychINFO results

The most useful result from my PsychINFO search was:
Lin, Julian. "Development of scales for the measurement of principles of design." International Journal Of Human-Computer Studies 71, no. 12 (December 2013): 1112-1123. PsycINFO, EBSCOhost (accessed February 11, 2014).

Among other work, Lin tested whether principles of design predicted the perceived ease of use of a site better than perceived aesthetics, and found that it did. In particular, he found that the application the design principles of "balance oneness (harmony), and...[sufficient] contrast" (Lin 5.3) led to measurably better perceptions of ease of use by site visitors.

My PsychINFO search was not as easy or as effective as my JSTOR search, probably because PsychINFO is a subject-specific database in an academic field I am not familiar with. However, I learned the useful (if somewhat obvious) lesson of the importance of being able to combine multiple field searches: My eventual successful search was: "SU:Websites AND AB:design." A database that only allowed one field-specified search at a time could not have produced the results that this search produced.

PsychINFO search part II

In the last post we established that the preferred term in the PsychINFO controlled vocabulary is "Websites."

Unfortunately, 3,122 documents in PsychoINFO use this subject term. Although all the results incorporated websites, I observed that often the characteristics or design of the site were not at issue in the studies. So I added 'design' as a keyword in the abstract field. Now my results look like this:

 
We can see that this third result looks promising. Even if the particular article does not turn out to be useful, its metadata may lead to useful revisions of the search. However, Lin et al did turn out to be a significant relevant result, so I stopped my search here.