BIOL 307

Here are a few sample searches that you can use yourself, or use as a model for creating your own keyword searches:

aging AND heart AND exercise

That search tells the library database that you want to find articles that contain all of those keywords.

We can also expand the search by using OR along with AND. Note that when we use OR, we place the keywords linked by OR inside parentheses. The parentheses tell the database to carry out our search in a logical order:

aging AND (heart OR cardio*) AND exercise

That search tells the database to find articles that contain the keywords aging and exercise, and those articles also have to have either the keyword heart or cardio.

And, by using the * symbol at the end of cardio, we tell the database to find articles that contain that keyword plus alternative endings for the keyword--so the database will look for cardio as well as cardiovascular.

Here are a few other sample searches you can try, and a video showing you a search like this in a library database.

• aging AND brain AND "mental health" 
  • note: we make our search more exact by putting keyword phrases of two or more words inside quotation marks--that tells the database to search for those two words in that order, e.g., "mental health"
• aging AND dementia AND (medicat* OR treatment)
  • medicat* tells the database to search for medicate, medication, medications
• aging AND digest* AND diet
  • digest* tells the database to search for digest, digestion, digestive

Click here for a quick video showing the basics of library database searching.