Earth Sciences (Dale Mabry): Search tips

Quick tips

• Library search tools often work best with just the most important, or key, words, and not long sentences or phrases.
  • One exception might be if the long sentence or phrase is the known title of a work you are hunting down.
• Try writing out how you would describe your topic to a friend, then pick the key words.
• Leave out words such as cause, effect, and comparison, unless these are part of a known title or technical term. 

This video demonstrates how to pick good key words:

As you read over the sources that you are finding, note any additional key words or search terms to try. You might add them to your search, or do a whole new search with those new words.

The following videos show you how: