IACUC, Animal Welfare, Literature Reviews: Search Strategy Builder

Find information to help search for alternatives (aka the "3Rs") mandated by the Animal Welfare Act and required for IACUC protocols (Breeding, section 6; Research, section 7; Instruction, section 2g) for Virginia Tech. Use the tabs below to jump to any s

A few tips to use when searching

Use Boolean Operators in your search statements:

  • AND (combine distinct concepts to narrow)
    • canine AND restraint
  • OR (expand by finding synonyms to each concept)
    • pig OR piglet OR swine OR porcine
  • NOT (exclude terms)
    • pig NOT guinea

Use Quotation marks to search for phrases

  • "social housing"
  • "magnetic resonance imaging"

Use "wild cards" for truncation (check the "help" section of a database to find out what symbols/wild cards are supported for various functionalities).

  • * usually expands the root of a word
    • handl*
      • handle, handler, handling, ...
  • ? or ! usually replaces 0 to 1 characters in a word
    • wom?n
      • woman, women
    • colo!r
      • color, colour

Use parentheses to indicate order of operations in your searches:

  • Correct:
    • (rabbit* OR lagamorph*) AND ("social housing" OR "group housing" OR "enriched cag*")
  • Incorrect:
    • rabbit* OR lagamorph* AND "social housing" OR "group housing" OR "enriched cag*"

Search Strategy Builder

Search Strategy Builder

The Search Strategy Builder is a tool designed to teach you how to create a search string using Boolean logic. Put synonyms in the columns for each specific concept, and when finished, "click to create a search statement."  You can copy/paste the search statement into the standard database search boxes to run your search.

  Concept 1 and Concept 2 and Concept 3
Extract the major concepts from your sentence above and enter them here.    

List alternatives for each concept.

These can be synonyms, or they can be specific examples of the concept.

Use single words or short phrases.

Find additional terms in abstracts and summaries of the articles, books, and other sources you find during initial searches.

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Search Strategy Builder created by University of Arizona Libraries and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.