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Wellesley College Research Guides

PHYS 310: Experimental Physics: In Class Activities Session #1

1. Consultations

Click the button below to make an appointment with me to chat about finding sources or citing them.

2. What feels challenging about research? What strategies will you share? Complete this JamBoard and I will update after class!

4. Searching

Search Tips:

When searching in a database, spelling matters! 

  • Unlike search engines, a database will not correct your typos and spelling mistakes. 

  • If you get zero results, first check that you spelled your keywords correctly.

Use quotation marks for phrase searching

  • If you are searching for multiple words or a phrase, like human computing, put those words within a set of quotation marks in the search box. 

  • If you search human computing, instead of "human computing" most databases will search human and computing as separate keywords

Use truncation to search for various endingsimage of the 3 Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT

  • aka “wildcards” - often a * at the end of a word (check the database)

  • Use in place of letters - comput* for computer, computing, computational

Other factors:

  • Plural and singular nouns usually do not matter. 

  • Capitalization usually does not matter. 

  • Spaces between letters or words might matter. 

  • Especially in acronyms or the names of medication or viruses or molecules or organisms

  • Bowerbird vs “Bower Bird” both are valid terms and return results in databases

6. Searching a database

Flipped Resources for after the Library session