Biology 150L (Beaster-Jones)

" "

To search for specific phrases, enclose them in quotation marks. The database will search for those words together in that order.

Examples:

“Drosophila Melanogaster”

“Hox genes”

“fruit fly development”

AND, OR

Join together search terms in a logical manner.

AND - narrows searches, used to join dissimilar terms
OR - broadens searches, used to join similar terms

Examples:

#1
Drosophila AND gene

#2
"fruit fly" OR Drosophila

#3
Embryo
AND
Drosophila OR "fruit fly"
AND
"Maternal mRNA"

TRUNCATION

Truncate a word in order to search for different forms of the same word. Many database use the asterisk * as the truncation symbol.

Example:

Truncate the word embry* to search for embryo, embryos, embryonic etc.