BIOL 410 A & CHEM 410: Seminar Fall 2025 Literature Search Assignment: Getting Started

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.

A student might meet with a librarian to discuss:

1. Finding Resources: To get help locating books, articles, and other materials relevant to their research topic.
2. Research Strategies: To learn effective search techniques and strategies for navigating databases and online resources.
3. Citation Assistance: To receive guidance on properly citing sources and citation management strategies.
4. Evaluating Sources: To get tips on assessing the credibility and relevance of sources.
5. Narrowing Topics: To refine or narrow down a broad research topic into a more manageable scope.
6. Developing Research Questions: To get help formulating strong, researchable questions.
7. Using Library Services: To learn how to use specific library services, such as interlibrary loan.

Uses for Google Scholar

If used appropriately, Google Scholar can be a great place to start your research. These are some of the way's you can use Google Scholar. 

• Find niche or obscure sources
  Google Scholar indexes a wide range of materials, such as theses, conference papers, and university repository content, that may not appear in traditional databases.

• Identify relevant literature across multiple platforms
  It pulls from publishers, repositories, and disciplines, making it ideal for interdisciplinary research or broad topic exploration.

• Track citations and research impact
  Use the “Cited by” feature to see how often a paper has been cited and discover newer research that builds on it.

• Access open versions of articles
  Scholar often links to free PDFs hosted on author websites or university repositories, helping you bypass paywalls.

• Discover related research
  The “Related articles” feature helps you find similar studies without needing to refine your search terms.

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]

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.