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Wellesley College Research Guides

NEUR 320: Current Trends in Neurodegenerative Disease Research: In Class Activities

1. Consultations

 

Meet with a Research Librarian

 

Meet with Allegra

2. Strategizing your topic before searching for articles

3.Tips on how to read scholarly articles

Resources

Image from Western Oregon University Hamersly Library showing examples and definitions of primary, secondary and teritiary sources

Infographics

4. Search in a database

5. 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 cell membrane, put those words within a set of quotation marks in the search box. 

  • If you search cell membrane, instead of "cell membrane" most databases will search cell and membrane 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 - environ* for environment, environmental, environmentalist, etc.

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

Flipped Resources for after the Library session

Thesis Festival 2024! Coming October 10th!