BIOL 410 A & CHEM 410: Seminar Fall Spring 2023 Literature Search Assignment: Home

A mind map is the visualization of a subject and its related concepts. For example, if you were going to write a paper on Fashion History, you would need to narrow it down. Using a mind map, you could visualize it's sub-topics until you found a good fit. These sub-topics can serve as a good starting point for your keyword searches.

There are several free tools online for creating a mind map, but sometimes it is easiest to use pen and paper!

Found in the library catalog, Citation trails is an exploration tool that helps to find related articles and to a topic further by showing both articles cited by and cited in the current article.

In the Settings menu on the left hand side, click on Library Links.

From here, search for Phillips Library and check and save all relevant options. 

When you find a relevant article, Google Scholar will link to additional articles via:

Related articles: A list of similar articles and resources.

Cited by: A list of publications citing that article.

Both these links are available under every search result.

Google Scholar Library allows you to save and organize your own collection of articles within Scholar.

• Click 'save' below a search result to add it to your library. 
• Click 'my library' to access your saved articles 
• Can be linked to your Google Scholar Profile

Use operators to refine your search terms. Google Scholar also supports most of the advanced operators in Google web search:

• the "-" operator excludes all results that include this search term, as in [biomedicine -magnetic]
• phrase search only returns results that include this exact phrase, as in ["as you like it"]
• the "~" operator will find synonyms for that word, as in [~robotics]
• the "OR" operator returns results that include either of your search terms, as in [soccer OR football]
• the "intitle:" operator as in [intitle:mars] only returns results that include your search term in the document's title
• the "author" operator [author:flowers] returns papers written by people with the name Flowers, whereas [flowers -author:flowers] returns papers about flowers, and ignores papers written by people with the name Flowers
• using quotes around a common word makes sure your results include common words, letters or numbers that Google's search technology generally ignores, as in ["the" border]