BIOL 499: Senior Department Studies (HC) Fall 2025

Example

You stumble upon this article, and it peaks your interest. So you ask yourself:

Is there a relationship between gut bacteria and autism?

Step 1: Break up this research question into two or three main concepts. Ignore extraneous words.

• Concept #1: gut bacteria
• Concept #2: autism

Step 2: Conduct an initial search with these words, and quickly scan the results. 

Step 3: Using information from your initial search, add synonyms, acronyms, and variant spellings.

• Concept #1: gut bacteria, gut flora, intestinal microbiome
• Concept #2: autism, autistic

• Even if the search engine you are using doesn't require you to enter boolean operators, it is still using them behind the scenes. It will help you to know the logic behind your search
  .
• AND gives you results that include ALL of your concepts.
   
• OR gives you results that include ANY of your concepts.
  ​
• Essentially, you are searching:​

(gut bacteria OR gut flora OR intestinal microbiome) AND (autism OR autistic)

Try Subject Searching!

You are probably most used to keyword searching, in which you brainstorm search words and various synonyms.

Subject searching can be used in addition to or as an alternative to keyword searching. If you use the correct subject heading, you will capture synonyms automatically (e.g. "brain injuries" will find "brain injury" and "concussion"). How do you know what the correct subject heading is? You can look them up in many databases. 

• In PubMed, change the drop-down to "MeSH".

There are people whose job it is to read articles and assign subject headings to them (i.e. decide what they are "about"). It's kind of like assigning a hashtag to something and then being able to search by that hashtag (...kind of).