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Researching for Biology Labs: Searching Databases

A lab guide for scientific writing and research.

What's in this Section?

The power of a search interface is in the tools available to help you search: 

  • the availabilty of a controlled vocabulary and the use of subject headings to describe and categorize content regardless of whether a particular keyword is used or not.
  • field searching for specificity.
  • the ability to combine terms in different ways, known as Boolean logic
  • the availability of truncation and wildcard characters to help you find variant spellings of terms.
  • the availabilty of limiters to help you refine your search