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Basics of Science Literature Searches

Provides literature research guidance for students in STEM research programs at Georgia Southern University

Examples

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 the 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 topics in the same source!