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BSCI 361: Principles of Ecology

A guide to support the research needs of students in BSCI 361: Principles of Ecology

Building Your Search Strategy

  • Searching is iterative! It will require multiple steps to form a search strategy and multiple search strategies to find resources.
  • A good search is more than Google Scholar. While Google Scholar is worthy of using, it has its limits. Google Scholar should be one resource among others such as library databases. 
  • The strength of your search strategy depends on the strength of your research question. A bad research question will lead to bad search strategies and vice versa. 
  • Practice! The more you practice building a search strategy and searching databases, the better and faster you will become at finding resources!

Before you embark on building your search strategy, you need to be sure your question is built well. Look at the below examples. What do you notice about these examples?

  1. How are insectivorous bird populations influenced by insect populations? 
  2. How are pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) populations influenced by pest insect populations?
  3. How are woodpecker populations influenced by pest insect populations?

What is noticeable about these three questions? Too broad? Too narrow?

Now that you have a well built research question, you need to look for keywords to use for your search. You cannot search using the entire question, so knowing how to pick good keywords is crucial. 

When thinking about keywords, it can be helpful to make a table to fill in. Begin by separating your question into several topics. Then pick what the keywords are based on those topics. But don't only use the direct words in the question, but think of synonyms, scientific names, and other related words to your keywords.  

For example, if you have the question, "How are woodpecker populations influenced by pest insect populations?", what topics and keywords would you choose?  

Compare what you chose to my table below.  

Topic 1 Topic 2 Topic 3
Hover over this text to see Woodpecker
Hover over this text to see Pest
Hover over this text to see Insect
Hover over this text to see Picidae
Hover over this text to see Invasive
Hover over this text to see Non-native

Boolean Operators are words that connect search terms or key words together to broaden or narrow the results retrieved. In library research they are often used with the library's research databases or the library catalog. 

The three Boolean operators are AND, OR, and NOT.

  • AND narrows your search results by limiting your results to those that contain both words connected with AND.
  • OR expands your search results by including results that contain one word, the other word, or both words.
  • NOT narrows your search results by limiting your results to those that contain the word you designate before NOT, but not the word after NOT.

One way to visualize Boolean Operators is to use a Venn diagram like below. 

 

 


Boolean Operator Venn Diagram

Truncation can be applied to a keyword search in a database or search engine to broaden your results and allow you to look for variations of words.

The symbol can be used in a search to retrieve alternate word endings. 

For example, searching "surg*" will retrieve surgery, surgeries, surgeon, or surgical. But use caution as truncating a keyword too much can result in unrelated results. As an example, searching "stud*" will retrieve study, studies, student, students, etc.

Wildcards are symbols that can replace a single letter in a word. This is useful when dealing with variant spelling. As examples, searching "p*ediatric" will look for variant spellings of pediatric such as paediatric, or searching "colo*r" will look for variant spellings of color such as colour. 

Wildcards can come in different symbols, but the most common are *, ?, and $.