Suss out the main concepts of your search and generate terms that might be possible alternatives for your protocol. Note that it will not be an effective search strategy if you have "alternative" as one of your concepts and don't expand upon that term. Rather, you should research and brainstorm alternate modes of achieving similar results that you could potentially use as an alternative in your research.
Common practice is to use the following concepts as applicable to your protocol:
- Species
- Anatomy, organ systems or tissue
- Condition, treatment, disease, hormones, etc.
- Alternative (think about the three R's: reduce, replace, refine)
Example search:
Concept 1 |
Concept 2 |
Concept 3 |
Rabbits |
Urine collection |
Alternatives |
Next, generate terms that can stand in for one of your concepts. This doesn't have to be exhaustive, but listing for instance the species name of the type of rabbits you will study is good practice. Maybe there is a specific strain of animal you are focusing on. And of course, you'll want to expand concept 3, which right now is just alternatives.
Concept 1 |
Concept 2 |
Concept 3 |
Rabbits |
Urine collection |
Alternatives |
"Oryctolagus cuniculus" |
Urine |
Methods |
"O. cuniculus" |
|
Reduce stress, stress reduction
|
|
|
Metabolism cages |
|
|
Housing |
Next, connect your concepts with boolean operators, truncation, and nesting to allow the search system to hone in on the desired topics.
(Rabbit* OR "Oryctolagus cuniculus" OR "O. cuniculus") AND (Urine OR "Urine collect*") AND (alternative* OR method* OR "reduce stress" OR "stress reduction" OR "metabolism cage*" OR housing)
Now, you have a string that you can plug into databases.