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Bio 3191/Bio455: Molecular Mechanisms in Development: Suggestions for Searching

[http://library.wustl.edu/subjects/life/mmod.html]

Link to top Life Sciences page

I suggest two databases for identifying articles to read: Medline and Web of Science. You can use one or both. I've also made some suggestions for locating the articles after you identify them.

Let me repeat Professor Miller's suggestion that you are welcome to ask Biology Library staff or the Biology Librarian for assistance in using the library or databases.

Ruth Lewis email: rlewis @ wustl.edu phone: 935-4819
Biology Library email: biology@wumail.wustl.edu phone: 935-5405

PubMed Medline help:

  • Connect to PubMed
  • Search strategy tips:
    • Use "*" for wildcard/truncation
    • Use boolean AND, OR, NOT (must be upper-case) to combine terms
    • Use parentheses to combine terms
    • Example: (polarit* OR wnt) AND elegans
    • If results are surprising, click on the "Details" box to see what was really searched. Sometimes it interprets your searches differently than you intended.
  • When you are looking at an especially relevant citation you might try some of these techniques:
    • choose Medline display option - this will usually display the subject headings, called MH or MeSH, which may give you some new search terms to try.
    • click on "Related Articles" - this will give you many citations which have MeSH terms in common with the especially relevant citation you started with. These will be listed in relevance order, "best" first, so you only need to browse through the first 20-30.
  • If you are working (actually or virtually) on the WU campus, watch for Links to the full text journal; the label will be the title of the journal. We do not have subscriptions to all full text journals, but you will be able to read many articles directly from your computer screen by following these links. We also have many other full text journals that do not have links in PubMed.
  • After you have limited (by date or some other criteria) to the articles you want to look for, sort by "journal". Then you only need to search each journal title once, to get library or web location.
  • PubMed Help [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query/static/help/pmhelp.html]
  • For other Medline options see Medline More Info [http://library.wustl.edu/databases/about/medline.html]

Web of Science help:

  • Connect to Web of Science [http://isiknowledge.com/wos] - you must be actually on WU campus or consult Information about access from outside WU campus
  • Usually choose "Full Search" and then "General Search"
  • Search strategy similar to PubMed:
    Use "*" for wildcard/truncation
    Use boolean AND, OR, NOT or phrases
    Use parentheses to group your search terms
    Web of Science is NOT case sensitive; you may use any combination of upper and lower case letters
    Example, either works fine: (polarit* OR wnt) AND elegans
          Example: (polarit* or wnt) and elegans
  • When you are looking at an especially relevant citation, you might want to try some of these techniques:
    • "Related Records" button. This will display citations that have some references in their bibliographies in common with the article you started on. They will be listed in "relevance" order, so you only need to review the first 20-30 citations even though there will likely be MANY more. Sometimes this works very well and sometimes not.
    • If the relevant citation is more than 1-2 years old, try "Times Cited" link. This will give you newer articles that have cited this article, so you can move forward in time. Sometimes this works very well and sometimes not.
  • Web of Science allows you to SORT up to 300 citations by Source Title. (If you have more than 300, go through and select first and then sort your Selected Records.) This is quite handy for retrieval since journals are shelved alphabetically by title in both the Biology Library and the Becker Medical Library.
  • Click on "help" button while you are in the database for extensive documentation on Web of Science.
  • Please be sure to click on "logoff", near the top of the screen, when you are finished in Web of Science; number of concurrent users is limited. Thanks.

Locating the articles: Once you have selected the articles you want to read, here are my suggestions for locating them.