When you're doing research for a project, you'll likely need to think of search terms to type into the database you're using. To come up with these terms to use for your search, it can be helpful to make a list of words and phrases related to the topic you're interested in.
A list like this can also help you discover what you're interested in about your topic. For instance, you might be very interested in how turtles adapt in anoxic environments. Here we have three clear keywords we could experiment with: turtle, anoxic, and environment. This gives us a starting place.
Once you have a list of words, you can try searching for different combinations of them. See which combinations find the sort of articles you're interested in.
There are also specific ways to structure a search in a database that will help you find more of the articles you want. For example, you might be inclined to type a search such as How do freshwater turtles adapt to anoxic stresses? However, databases understand searches better when they are keywords and phrases connected by AND, OR, and NOT. For example, turtle AND anoxia. If I want to get information on freshwater turtles specifically and want to make sure I'm capturing all possible forms of the the word anoxia (such as anoxic), I can rewrite the search statement as this: "freshwater turtle" AND anoxi*. This impacts the number of search results that come up.
(Searcher's note: I've put quotation marks around "giant pandas" in the example above to look for it as a phrase, rather than 'giant' and 'panda' separately.)
You may need to try different words for similar ideas to find more search results.
It may take some trial and error to find the search terms that get you the kind of articles you want, and that's normal!
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