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Finding Articles For Research Articles

1 AND/OR

Use AND / OR to join search terminology.

  • OR - joins similar terms / terms that get at the same issue - BROADENS
  • AND - joins dissimilar terms - NARROWS

Examples: Using OR

  1. "phospholipid bilayer" OR "cell membrane"
  2. Covid OR "sars-cov-2" OR "coronavirus 2"
  3. "PCR" OR "polymerase chain reaction"
  4. "Caenorhabditis elegans" OR "C. elegans" OR "roundworm"

Examples: Using AND

  1. "virus" AND "mRNA"
  2. "regenerative medicine" AND "stem cells" AND tissue

Examples using AND & OR

Sample Search A

"sars-cov-2" OR "Covid 19"

   AND

"wastewater surveillance"

Question: What strategy might we take if Sample A returns too many results?  How could we modify this search?

Phrase Searching ""

It is common to search for a specific phrase with "quotation marks ".  Most databases will recognize the using of quotation marks to search for two works together.

Examples: " "

  • "stem cell line"
  • "bipedal hominid"
  • "mechanism of action"
  • "biogas digester"

Phrase searching ensures that you won't be searching for the individuals words within the phrase, which could return a lot of irrelevant results. 

Truncation

Search for alternate forms of a work by truncating it and adding an asterisk *.

Examples: *

  1. hydro* > hydroelectric, hydrology, hydropower...
  2. bio* > biology, biological, bioinformatic...
  3. perform* > perform, performs, performing, performance...

Truncation BROADENS

You can use truncation to search for all suffixes on a root work. Be careful though, some complete words might be related to topics outside of your research interest. 

Keywords

Keywords are what we call the words we use when searching. You can use a few or a lot of keywords depending on what you're trying to find. 

Keywords may come from your topic, or thesis, but can also come from individual questions that you're trying to answer in your research.