BIO 347: Immunology

Welcome to the class research guide for BIO 347: Immunology with Dr. Morrison. This guide will provide recommended research resources including advanced searching techniques, library materials, and citation examples.

The following definitions are important concepts to understand as you locate sources and work on your annotated bibliography: 

• Scholarly Journal Articles: these sources are written by experts in their field to communicate research and findings with other scholars and students studying that subject. Scholarly journal articles often use more technical and/or subject specific language, so it is good practice to first build an understanding of your topic through reference resources and review articles. 
   
• Peer-Review: also known as refereed, this is the process of submitting an article for publication through an external review of other subject experts that evaluates the quality of scholarship and validity of the methodology and procedures. 
   
• Medical Subject Headings: commonly referred to as MeSH terms, this is a controlled vocabulary system that helps researchers, authors, and readers talk about a topic or term using the same language. You will find MeSH terms in the MEDLINE and PubMed databases, and they are a great place to locate additional keywords when building a search. 

Boolean Operators (AND, OR, NOT)

• AND: use to narrow your search and combine topics, terms, or subjects (ex: rheumatoid arthritis AND deep vein thrombosis).
• OR: use to expand your search and look for similar topics or synonyms (ex: deep vein thrombosis OR dvt).
• NOT: use to omit a term from your search (ex: allergies NOT food).

Truncation*

• Truncation - adding an asterisk (*) symbol after the root of a word - broadens your search by finding word variations that begin with the same letters.
• child* = child, childs, children, childrens

"Quotation Marks"

• Using quotations marks tells a database to search for an exact title or phrase.
• "Deep vein thrombosis" , "Rheumatoid arthritis"