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BIOL 4620 - Undergraduate Seminar: Start Your Research

Provides review and guidance for students in Biology Seminar.

Creating a Search Strategy from a Research Question

Keyword Searching

For effective searching, DO NOT use sentence structure, such as your thesis statement or research question. 

Instead, use a keyword or keyword phrase to search library resources (Catalog, Databases) and web search engines (Google and Google Scholar) and locate results matching that word/s in a specified part (title, abstract, full-text) of the item. Once you have identified your key search concepts, start brainstorming some related terms (synonyms) to your key concepts.

Use a general thesaurus, subject dictionaries and encyclopedias, your syllabus, professor's notes, and subject headings to help you formulate keywords. 

 

Diagram of Research Process for identifying search terms 

Use the worksheet provided to help guide you through developing keyword search concepts from your research question. 

More Tips:

More Tips

Take Notes! 

Do the same search more than once!

Notice Author Names, Journal Titles, Databases, of ANY sources that look promising. (Remember, the databases help you with this!)

Use the References of a source to help you find additional sources! If you need help going from a citation to a source in hand, ASK!!

Use the Cited BY, or Times Cited in this Database to find more current articles than the one you found. 

Learn to set up Alerts. You can set up Alerts for Specific Journals, Specific Articles, and also Search Alerts! 

 

  Welcome to the Research Guide for BIOL4620 - Undergraduate Seminar.  

            This guide has been specifically created to help you be successful in navigating resources for your Seminar Class!  Use the tabs to go specifically to the help you need.This guide will be available the duration of the semester, and is accessible from any computer or mobile device. 

Take the Time

  • To create an Illiad account if you don't already have one! Interlibrary loan will probably be a reality at some point in your research future. Save time now, and create your account. This will alleviate a great deal of frustration and confusion once you are researching and find something that the library does not subscribe to. 
  • Remember, even if you are on campus, your personal laptop will have an IP address that is not recognized. You will need to authenticate (your GS credentials) to fully access materials. Sometimes the initial login does not complete this. If you are searching the databases and see a yellow bar at the top of the page - you need to click and authenticate!
  • Ask-A-Librarian Chat is there for a reason! There is no need to second guess and deal with major frustration while searching library resources. The library chat function is on the library home page, and is also available through our library guides (little golden bubble on each page). Use it and receive an immediate answer to your question! 

Develop Your Search Strategy

Developing an effective search strategy involves:

  • Identifyng the key search concepts
  • Identifying related terms to the key search concepts
  • Using standard search structures to broaden and narrow your search results

While there is not ONE right way to do a search, the strategies identified here will improve your results!

Limiting and Expanding Your Search Using And, Or, Not...

Boolean searching involves adding or subtracting terms to your search to either broaden or narrow your search. It uses three terms (AND, OR, NOT) to tell the search engine or database whether to include or eliminate certain terms.                                  

 

                                                                                                                            Set of Ven Diagrams showing the relationship between Boolean Operators AND, OR, and NOT as used in a literature search query                                                

Targeting Your Search Using Quotation Marks...

Quotation Marks can be used to identify Phrases.

By using quotations marks, you can tell the computer to only bring back pages with the terms you typed in the exact order you typed them.

"climate change"

Instead of 

climate AND change

 

"expansive soil" 

Instead of 

expansive AND soil

 

Expanding Your Search Using Truncation...

Truncation allows you to search various forms of a word by finding alternative endings. The characher (*) is placed at the end of the first few letters of a search term or at the end of its root.

Ethic* retrieves

Ethics

Ethical

Ethically

Example: Also Highlighted in Video on this Page

Bitmoji Image with text Breaking it Down     Developing Your Search Query

By now you should have read through these tips on pulling and locating possible search terms. Remember, also, that your terms can come from your topic provided your professor. 

But how do you actually use these Operators AND and OR?

Here is a simple example of how this actually works:

 

bitmoji image with text Snack Attack

 Let's say you are doing research on the following topic:  Why is salty and sweet such a desired snack combination?

Now let's decide which keywords are the most important and provide at least two synonyms for each.

Salty:Salinity, Briny, Sodium    Sweet:Sugary, Saccharine     Desired:Wanted, Sought, Craved   

 

Now that I have my keywords from my research question and some synonyms, I can begin making sets of possible search queries.

Salty AND Sweet AND Desired

(Salty OR Salinity) AND (Sweet OR Sugary) AND (desired OR craved)

There are other combinations that may work for this research question, but hopefully, you get the picture. 

Remember, OR is going to expand your results. It is great for the following situations:

  • To retrieve all members of an entire class of items - be sure to include the name of the class!  Citrus OR Oranges OR Lemons OR Tangerines OR Grapefruit.
  • Search both the acronym or initialism and the full name:  HPLC OR high-performance liquid chromatography
  • Search both Common and Scientific Names: Poison Oak OR Toxicodendron diversilobum
  • Search similar concepts *like we did above!   Salty OR Salinity
  • And sometimes you can actually use acronyms to fully express your concept:  dehydration OR hydration,   fertility OR sterility

AND will narrow your results! 

Salty AND Sweet:  The database will pull items that only deal with both of these in the same source! 

Subjects: Biology