NFSC 345 - Dietary Supplements & Functional Foods

Search Tips for Databases

Do not use “natural language” in your search.

  • INSTEAD OF: “does taking a fish oil supplement regularly prevent heart disease?”
  • USE: (“fish oil” AND “heart disease” AND prevention)

BOOLEAN OPERATORS you will use most often are AND and OR (always capitalize)

  • AND narrows or narrows a search: milk AND calcium AND vitamin D will return results that have all three words.
  • OR expands a search. Use OR to search for synonyms or related concepts: fish oil OR omega 3; females OR women.
  • NOT tells the database to eliminate a word that is not relevant to your topic: Dolphins NOT Miami will eliminate all the references to the football team so you get only items about seagoing mammals.

SYMBOLS

 *  An asterisk can be used in many databases to retrieve a root word with multiple endings: child* will find child, children, childhood, childrearing, etc.

“ “   Quotation marks create a phrase to tell the database that you want to search words together in a particular order: “fish oil” will find that phrase in that order.

( )    Parentheses nest words so the database searches them in the right order. “heart disease” AND (“omega 3” OR “fish oil”) tells the database to look for the words in ( ) first and then to combine that set with heart disease.

Search Tips for PubMed

 

  • Access PubMed through the library webpage to take advantage of the ability to link to the library’s journal holdings. Your search results will include the link. If free full text is not available in PubMed we may have a subscription to the journal either online or in print. 

  •  Use the "filters" in the left column to apply a variety of limits to your search. For example, publication date, article types, and characteristics of test subjects.

  • Choose "Advanced" to use the PubMed Search Builder to do advanced searching. Use the MeSH database to find subject terms to incorporate into your search.

Empirical Research

These are some key features to look for when identifying empirical research in Nutrition and Food Science for your scholarly/peer reviewed articles.

NOTE: Not all of these features will be in every empirical research article, some may be excluded, use this only as a guide.

  • Statement of methodology
  • Research questions are clear and measurable
  • Individuals, group, subjects which are being studied are identified/defined
  • Data is presented regarding the findings
  • Controls or instruments such as surveys or tests were conducted
  • There is a literature review
  • There is discussion of the results included
  • Citations/references are included

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