International Food Business

This section contains advice and resources to help you with the second step of your research assignment: searching and locating relevant, high-quality sources of information.

Points to remember:

• Research is a journey, so give yourself lots of time--you'll go down many paths, some may be dead-ends, some may take you further into the woods, and some will take you exactly where you need to go.  Be open to exploring.
• Break down your research topic into its major concepts and combine those concepts with Boolean operators (see below). 
• Come up with a list of synonyms for your search terms to see if you can find more by trying different keywords.  Check for a database thesaurus to see if there is standard terminology you should be using to find material.
• Use a combination of approaches to finding sources; Novanet will bring you a high number of results from various databases, but the relevance may be lower than searching directly in a subject-specific database.  However, only searching in a subject-specific database might not locate some key works from other databases.  

An academic library database is a collection of information that can be searched and used for research and writing. Databases include articles, journals, reports, magazines, newspapers, books, and more. Some databases are subject specific and some cover many areas of interest. 

There are 3 key access points for databases on the Dalhousie Libraries website:

• Novanet
• A-Z database list
• the databases page in any subject guide 

Searching in academic databases involves some strategies that you may not have encountered with general web searching. It's important to consider your keywords carefully and construct logical search strings.

Boolean operators help you develop searches that will connect you to relevant material. Learn more about Boolean operators from the resources and videos below and then try to defeat a zombie apocalypse using your Boolean knowledge in Zombool (created by Dalhousie Librarian, Julie Marcoux)!

Librarian's tip:

Use the USDA's Agricultural Thesaurus to find related concepts and scientific terminology to use in your searches!

This video gives you a quick introduction to how Boolean searching works:

This video goes into some more in-depth techniques to try with your searches: