BIOL 312 Wildlife Ecology and Management Class Guide

Once you find a database, here are some tips for searching it as efficiently as possible:

Look for ways to limit your results:

• Unlike Google, you are not limited to just a keyword search. In most databases you can narrow down your results by:
  • subject area,
  • type of material (just peer-reviewed journal articles), or
  • date published (this especially important in an area like wildlife ecology where information can become dated very quickly)
• Explore the subject or thesaurus terms that are used by most databases. Since these are standardized, they allow you to find all the relevant information on a particular subject and weed out a lot of false hits. 
• Quotation marks will isolate that phrase: "natural selection" lists results containing only that specific phrase, but results for natural selection would contain natural AND selection somewhere, not necessarily side by side
• Remember to use Boolean Operators to help make your search more efficient:
  • AND will produce results that contain BOTH terms (e.g. birds AND bees)
  • OR generates results that contain EITHER term (e.g. dogs OR canines)
  • NOT results will include the first terms, but not the second (cats NOT musical)

Science Specific Databases

Interdisciplinary Databases