Biology 2700 - Microbiology: Library Resources

Use a combination of the following search techniques to create the most effective searches in the library databases. In addition to the techniques below, make use of the database-specific limiters to focus your search more (date range and source-type limiters can be very helpful, for example).

Keywords—Keywords are one way to create search strategies to locate relevant information on your topic. Keywords are the most significant words and phrases associated with your topic.

Quotation Marks/Phrase Searching—Use quotation marks to search for a specific phrase.

            Example: “bacillus species”    

Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT

And—narrows a search by inclusion.

Example: chemical control AND microorganisms retrieves only sources that include both search terms, which limits the number of results.  

Or—expands a search.

Example: microorganism OR pathogen will retrieve sources containing either term, expanding your pool of resources.    

Not—narrows a search by exclusion.

Example: pathogen NOT bacteria retrieves only sources that contain the first keyword, eliminating sources for keywords that follow not.

Truncation—Usually using an asterisk*, increases the number of results you’ll retrieve by searching for variant endings of a word root.

            Example: biol* retrieves biology, biologic, biologically