BIOL 230 - Fundamentals of Ecology

To start any research project, you need to begin looking for sources. For an effective search, you need to use keywords, which are the building blocks of academic searching. There are two steps to good keyword formation:

• Pinpoint the main concepts that compose your question
• Expand each of those terms by brainstorming synonyms, related words and/or variant spellings.

Before you begin searching for information, you first need to identify what the main concepts of your question are. This will help you determine the best places to look, and the best search terms to use.

For instance, there have been recent news articles about a group of orcas suddenly sinking boats off the coast of Spain. UBC researchers have even commented on the phenomenon.

I'm interested in learning more about this whale behaviour and have come up with the following research problem to explore:

What is the impact of boat interactions on the behaviour of killer whales?

Image: NMFS vessel Nautical by NOAA Photo Library, CC BY 2.0

To come up with your search terms, think about how your question can be simplified to 2-3 main ideas or concepts.

For this question, our initial main concepts might be:

killer whales    AND     behaviour

Then think of the different ways to describe these concepts:

As you research your topic, you will increase your knowledge and learn terms that could potentially give you better results!

In some cases you might also want to break your search into three concepts. For instance, we might want to search for killer whales and boats and behaviour

If your topic is very specific and you're not finding many resources, you may need to look at broader concepts. For instance, I've consulted a taxonomy to find the family of the species to see if there might be broader results.Then, you could support your report by extrapolating the broad information to your specific topic. Take a look at some of the reference sources below to help you brainstorm concepts and synonyms.

You should look for existing research about your topic to understand the past and current landscape of your ecological problem. What has already been done, and how can you take this further? Understanding the broader context of your problem will give you a deeper understanding of the problem itself.

Google automatically finds synonyms and variations on the keywords you search for. Other databases don't always have the same capabilities. Here are a few tips which can make your searches in the library catalogue and databases more effective:

Boolean operators: AND, OR, NOT

• Most databases assume an AND - they search for documents matching all the keywords you search for.
• OR can be very useful when you're not finding enough results - add in some synonyms to broaden your search. Use parentheses to gather these synonyms together and combine with another concept.
• NOT is equivalent to the minus sign in Google - use it to exclude a word from your search. Use with caution.

Phrase searching: put quotes around your keywords to find the words together, in that order. Might limit your search too much; use carefully.

Truncation: in most databases, an asterisk (*) at the end of a word will find all different endings.

• Example: (“killer whale” OR orca) AND behav*

The UBC Library catalogue uses ?. Check under the help for more information about what symbol to use in the database you are in.

Controlled vocabulary or subject headings: these are terms added to articles or books to help you find related topics. In some databases, you can click on these or add them to your search to help improve your results.