Library tutorial for agricultural, animal & veterinary sciences

Define your topic

Before you begin your search you should analyse or define what the topic of your assignment is.
That will make it easier to decide on keywords to search for information.

Keywords will help you locate the books, journal articles or web pages that are relevant to your topic.

For example, the assignment "discuss the effect of temperature on pig production "

The key concepts of this assignment are temperature and pig production.

For more information on analysing your topic, see the Library tutorial: Help! I'm not sure how to interpret my essay question.

Identify keywords

Now you need to list related terms for each concept, that you can use as keywords in your search. Related terms include:

• Synonyms - words that mean the same thing, e.g. pigs, swine
• Alternative spellings e.g.behaviour (Australian and British) or behavior (U.S.)
• Singular or plural forms of words e.g pig or pigs
• common or scientific names e.g. pigs or sus scrofa
• other related concepts, e.g. piggeries, pig housing, heat, cold, thermal stress

Task words such as discuss, analyse, explain, should not be included as keywords in your search.

To find keywords, look up your key concept words in print or online reference sources. These will also help to give you an overview of the topic.

• Dictionaries: find these through a Library catalogue keyword search, e.g. veterinar? dictionaries or from the Resource Guides.
• Encyclopedia: find these through a Library catalogue keyword search, e.g. animal? ency? or from the Resource Guides.
• Thesauri: find these from the Resource Guides.

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Back to tutorial main page | Continue to Section 2: Develop a search strategy