MBIO 610: Advanced Topics in Molecular Biology

A thesis statement or a research hypothesis is not equivalent to a search you would do in a database. You may have to translate a thesis statement into multiple searches in order to understand multiple aspects of an issue.

The main things to keep in mind when creating a searchable question is that it needs to be or have:

• Specific enough to your needs 
• Accurate and non-biased
• Measurable outcomes

Which of the following is a searchable question that follows SAM principles?

Example 1:  Does diet improve diabetes?

Example 2: Does a low-fat diet lower blood glucose in type-II diabetics?

Example 3: Does a low-fat diet effect blood glucose in type-II diabetics?

Once you've built your question, you now need to break it apart into it's most important individual topics. Each concrete idea in your question probably has multiple ways to express it - synonyms. You need to spend a bit of time brainstorming synonyms that represent the discrete main ideas of your question. Many times you may not be using exact synonyms, but a combination of words that represent the same idea. In the chart below, you can see hemoglobin A1c being used instead of direct synonyms like blood sugar because in medicine, the hbA1c test is a measure of blood glucose.

Remember: Computers are dumb, YOU are smart. Computers do only as much as they are programmed to do and cannot truly understand human language. They don't understand that words have meaning or that synonyms exist, therefore you have to provide that information to the computer.

* Abbreviations are often not recognized as standing for a full word by computer searches. In the case of carb vs. carbohydrate, since carb is just the first 4 letters of a longer word, you may pull up results talking about both, but to be sure you capture everything available you will want to use both the abbreviation and the full term. The difference between Hemoglobin A1c and HbA1c definitely needs to be explicitly given to the computer.

** Just as computers don't understand or "know," the difference between roman numerals and arabic numerals has to be taken into consideration when searching as well.

After you have brainstormed lists of keywords and understand the main topics in your question, you then need to form a search string using the symbols and operators that databases and search engines understand.

Computers understand mathematical logic, so when you set up a search string, there are three main operations you can do. These operations are represented with three short words, known as Boolean Operators. Each operator tells the computer to perform a different type of action between the terms, or sets of terms, in your search.

AND

OR

NOT

Quotation Marks

• This tells to search the words as a specific phrase.
• Ex. Finds “Global warming” instead of the default: Global AND warming, where the two words could appear anywhere in the result, not necessarily as a phrase

Parenthesis

• Parenthesis are used just like in math to specify order of operations and group one set of synonyms together.
• Especially useful when using OR operator in between similar concepts.
• Ex. ("hemoglobin A1c" OR HbA1c OR "blood glucose")

Truncation

• Truncation, also called stemming, is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings.
• To use truncation, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end.
• Truncation symbols may vary by database; but the most common is the asterisk *
• Ex. genetic* = genetic, genetics, genetically