Universal Access
For many research assignments, including your BIOL 1004 library assignment, you need to use keywords to look for articles about: (1) careers in biological sciences, or (2) by faculty in VT's Biological Sciences Department. In the future, (3) you may also use keywords to find research on a topic.
Use research databases from the Select a Database page to try out searching methods shown in the examples below:
(1) Find articles about Biological Sciences careers: open a research articles database from the Select a Database page on this guide and type in words or phrases from the careers or graduate programs you investigated.
Example: to find articles on being a Geneticist, try searching for:
(2) Find articles by a Biological Sciences faculty member: go to a research articles database from the Select a Database page on this guide and type in the last name and first initial of a faculty member. Or, if you see a 'publications' list for that faculty on their department or lab website, copy the title of the article and paste that into Summon or another research database.
(2a) Example: to find publications by Lisa Belden, a Biological Sciences faculty in the Web of Science or PubMed research database, try searching for:
(2b) To find articles listed on a faculty member's lab or website publications list.
Example: The Belden Lab publications list includes this article: "Using “omics” and multi-omics approaches to guide probiotic selection to mitigate chytridiomycosis and other emerging infectious diseases."
(3) Find articles or other sources on a topic: think of words or phrases for the main ideas you're interested in.
Example: for the research question:
How can we use omics approaches to address infectious diseases?
You could create a search that looks something like this:
omics AND infectious diseases
If you don't find anything with that search, then you may want to try adding synonyms to your search:
(omics OR genomics OR proteomics) AND infectious disease*
A few more tips for searching:
Try our Search Strategy Builder for an easy way to build more complex keyword searches for topic research!
Truncation: A symbol, specific to the search interface, which allows the retrieval of all endings for the specified base word. An asterisk (*) isoften used. For example, child* would retrieve records with children, childish, and every other word that begins with the root word "child."
Phrase Searching: Adding quotation marks around a phrase, such as "physical activity" will tell the database to search for these words together, rather than separately. *This will narrow your search (get you less results), so keep that in mind, but in some cases it's the best way to find results with a specific phrase of interest - especially when the words in that phrase are common on their own (like physical and activity).
