Biology Honors: Bioethics Paper: Databases

"How the CRISPR system works."Biomedical Beat.Web

Explore these databases to find digitized articles from authoritative magazines, journals, newspapers, and books. 

• Take advantage of the databases' citation tools to get your MLA citation.
• Remember to either email or download the article so you can refer to it later.
• To access databases off-campus, use the login and password provided to you in class, or email the librarian.

As you brainstorm about your topic, make a short list of nouns that relate to your subject. These are the keywords you will use to search for information from the databases. Use the following terms in combination with your keywords to improve your research results:

• Use quotation marks around keywords that are phrases
  • "human engineering"
• AND combines two keywords to narrow search results
  • CRISPR AND ethics 
• OR combines two similar concepts to broaden search results
  • ("gene therapy" OR bioengineering)
• Use truncation (*) to expand a keyword search to anything with the word stem
  • scien* --> science, scientific, scientists

Articles in science databases come from specialized reference sources, magazines and journals focused on scientific themes.

When you search a general database, results come from a wider range of sources, so you can learn about your topic from a multiple perspectives, not just from a science angle.