Starting out

Before searching the databases, ask yourself:

What is my hypothesis?
What information do I need to help explain what I will do in my lab and why I will do it?

For example:

What factors affect the heart rate of Daphnia?
What is the general physiological effect of caffeine or alcohol on other organisms?
What factors affect the heart rate of people?

Choosing words to use in your search

For this assignment, you will need to use the library's article databases to locate peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Note that the library's article databases are different from Google. To get the best results you will need to search them in a slightly different way than Google.

To improve your search results, identify the most important concepts from the question you are investigating.

For example, if your question is:

What factors affect the heart rate of Daphnia?

These are the main concepts of your question:

heart rate
Daphnia

What other words might work to find useful results? Think of synonyms and similar words. (Try heart beat or cardiac instead of heart rate. Try water flea or Crustacea instead of Daphnia.)

Use these words in the article databases, rather than typing in a long string of words. Click on the tab Finding journal articles in the left column of the page to continue!