This guide is designed to help you get started with library research for your H 344 course assignments. The guide provides tips for considering the keywords/search terms you use, provides guidance for using several search tools for finding different kinds of sources, and provides guidance for getting articles via the library (for free) when the search tool you are using does not have the full text immediately available.

If you have any questions, please reach out to me for help.

The success of your searching for relevant sources will depend on the terms/phrases (also called keywords or search terms) you use to represent the main ideas or concepts in your topic.

Take a moment to review the Understanding Keywords module on the Library How-To guide.

When considering what keywords to use for your search, it helps to think about your topic as representing different concepts. By using one or more words/phrases for each concept, you will build your keywords/search terms to use in various search tools.

Consider this research question:

How does highway traffic impact individuals living with cardivascular disease?

You could begin the search with the terms above but we can do better. There are likely other terms that also represent the concepts and we need to know how to combine them all together.

Two things to consider:

1. terms that generally represent the same concept (synonyms or nearly synonyms) are combined with OR
2. terms that represent different concepts are combined with AND

So for our search above, let's add more terms.

One version of a more complete search string looks like this:

(highway traffic OR urban air pollution OR traffic related pollution) AND (individuals OR adults OR children OR adolescents OR infants) AND (cardiovascular disease OR heart disease)

As you are working on developing keywords/phrases for your topic, you may want to add words beyond the ones you start with. You can find these additional terms in various places:

 - in the titles and abstracts of other articles (try glancing through the first page or two of your initial test searches)

 - in the terms that library databases will assign to articles that appear in those databases (the part of the page where there terms will appear may be called various things like:

• MeSH terms (stands for medical subject headings)
• subject terms
• index terms
• descriptors

If you find relevant terms in any of the places mentioned above, consider adding to your search as noted in the module "Convert Topic to Keywords and Construct Search String"