Research Skills Videos for the Sciences
The following tutorial and videos provide useful tips on searching for books and other types of information, evaluating sources, and citing sources. Not all of it will be relevant but many of the pages are quite helpful for researching science topics.
Research Skills for Engineering Students Tutorial and Videos (2024)
Search Steps
The Library has many resources to help you answer your research question.
Before you can start searching to find resources, you will need to take the following steps:
1) Define your research question. What are you trying to find out?
2) Identify 2-4 key ideas from your research question. What topics do your resources absolutely need to talk about in order to answer your question? Your key ideas should be described in one or two words each.
3) Identify synonyms for each of your key ideas. For example, if your key idea is "climate change", a synonym could be "global warming".
4) Combine synonyms with OR and add together different key ideas using AND. Example: ("climate change" OR "global warming") AND "wildfires".
5) Consider any of the other search tips below.
6) Search your terms in Summon or another resource. See suggestions in the following pages.
Search Tools
The following search tools can be used in Summon (General) Library search and when searching most other library resources to help you find what you are looking for. However, they don't really work in Google Scholar.
- Combine search terms with OR to expand a search: "climate change" OR "global warming"
- Combine search terms with AND to narrow a search: "climate change" AND wildfires
- Use quotation marks to search for a phrase: "forest fires"
- Use truncation to search for multiple endings on a word: wildfire* would retrieve articles about wildfire and wildfires
Search Activity
Consider a topic you want to research. Choose two of more key ideas and think about what keywords you would add together to search for that topic. When you combine them with AND it will retrieve only the results that contain both sets of keywords.
