BIO418 Animal Behavior (Belinsky)

Before you begin searching, it can be helpful to create running lists of key terms and concepts to combine in different ways. As you begin to find relevant articles and read their abstracts, return to this lis and add new words or phrases that seem important to your question. 

For example, let's say my question is: Does ecotourism have a deleterious effect on penguin breeding behavior?

I might break this question out into its constituent parts and being to brainstorm terms around them:

• Ecotourism, tours, "human interaction", disturb* 
• Effect, impact, negative, interfere
• Penguin, penguins
• Breeding, "breeding behavior", reproduction

Use quotes around a phrase to find words together in sequence. For example:

"Climate change"

"Voter suppression"

Use truncation (an asterisk) and wildcards (usually a question mark or exclamation point).

• child* and education

•  globali?ation and analysis

Child* brings up child, children, childhood, and any other word that starts with the root "child." This works in most of the databases.
Globali?ation brings up items with the words globalization or globalisation.
If you don't use truncation and wildcards, some databases will look for an exact match to the words you type, and you may miss some relevant materials.

(Warning: If you shorten the root word too much, you will bring up irrelevant items (soc* will bring up society and social and socioeconomic, but also Socrates).

To limit a google search to certain domains, enter your search as follows:

"climate change" site:.gov

"police violence" site:.org

Some material above adapted from Northeastern Library's top ten search tips.