Skip to main content

BIO155 (Spring '15): Biodiversity, Ecology and Conservation Laboratory: Search Tips

Fall 2016, M. Pratt

Search Tips

Whether you are searching for books in the Five College Library Catalog, or searching for scholarly articles in a library database, 
it pays to be organized as you start your search. Break down searching into a three step process.

 

STEP 1
Write down as much information about your topic as possible. Answer the following questions:

  • What is your topic?
  • What questions do you have?
  • What do you know? What don't you know?

Then, try to summarize what you are looking for in one or two sentences.

EXAMPLE: I would like to learn more about primates, specifically in regard to conservation.

STEP 2
Using the information in Step 1, list the main concepts of your topic.

EXAMPLE: primates, conservation

STEP 3
Now create a list of synonyms of your key concepts. Think broadly, think narrowly! This step is helping you expand your search
by expressing your query in a variety of ways. If you get too many results, then you can work on focusing your search.

 

primate*

ape*

*=wildcard; will find variations in a word. In this case, those after the letter "e". 

conservation

ecology

biodiversity

environment*

Add other term(s) to further narrow search

You will use the word lists you developed in Step 3 to create search strategies. Use "OR" between synonyms and "AND" between
concepts. For instance:

(primate* OR ape) AND (conservation OR ecology OR biodiversity OR environment*) 

Download this worksheet (with bonus search tips!) to help you organize your search strategy.

 

Get help from Rocco Piccinino

Rocco Piccinino

 

Contact:

413-585-2951
rpiccini@smith.edu
Young Library 106

Help
Libraries Service Desk:
413-585-2960
https://libguides.smith.edu/bio155spring15
libguides.smith.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-29
66902
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2UMWHVYWQE65U6FXTORVNSG6GHEKSINP
<urn:uuid:10a56f03-14ae-4c54-8fcb-2db30e87b0d9>
2020-07-04T17:59:51Z
3.86.37.148
text/html
sha1:HHFQX5TQPXXKSJTZZTR7NTJB4K5DQIIR
<urn:uuid:e8539f9d-08ba-4c48-b351-aaeb3afe0fc1>
https://libguides.smith.edu/bio155spring15
response
<urn:uuid:d99cb7f1-6ef5-4c91-b87c-ad4a3ce0e92a>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-29
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-125.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/