HONORS 499C Bioterrorism: Interdisciplinary Perspective on International, Political & Scientific Challenges

The default Discovery Search on the UMass Amherst Libraries home page is a good place to start searching for most of your topics.

Click on the "Advanced Search" link under the search bar first so that you will get a search interface with multiple lines to enable an effective complex search. It is helpful to use one line for each element/concept/part of your topic.

Example: 

Full string for first line:

covid-19 OR coronavirus OR 2019-ncov OR sars-cov-2

When you find an article you want, you can click on the UMass search button to get the full text.

The UMass search button connects to a tool that will find the full text online if it is available in any of the databases UMass has access to.

• It will also search the library catalog to see if the library has it in print.

If an article or book is unavailable at UMass Amherst, you can get it using our Interlibrary Loan service. There will be a link to Request this resource through Interlibrary Loan on the window that opens after you click the UMass search button.

• Here's a screenshot as an example of you might see after clicking the UMass search button.

More about Interlibrary Loan

To log into Interlibrary Loan use your UMass NetID and password (same as what you use for SPIRE and Moodle or Blackboard).

The first time you use Interlibrary Loan, you will be prompted to fill out a profile form, so we know who you are and how to contact you when your item arrives.

• NOTE: In the Delivery Preferences section of the profile form, you must choose a Loan Delivery Method and a Pickup Location. All article requests are delivered electronically, so these options do not apply to articles.

After completing the profile, you should then see a pre-populated article request form. Make sure all the required fields are completed (sometimes they don't all transfer to the form), then submit it and usually in 1-2 business days you'll get an email that your article has arrived! The email will include a link into the Interlibrary Loan system, where your article PDF will be available to print or download.

Truncation:

One way to include all variations of a word in a search without actually typing them all in your search string is to use a feature called truncation. This lets you type part of a word, then use the truncation symbol (usually *) to tell the database to search for any ending to the word.

For example, using vaccin* will tell the database to search for vaccine or vaccines or vaccination or vaccinations or vaccinating or vaccinated or...

You do need to be careful using truncation. If you use a small enough portion of a word that there could be hundreds of variants! So, you would NOT want to search on bio* as there are way too many variants.

Web of Science Citation Linking

One of the features of Web of Science is citation linking. For each article, in the "Citation Network" box at the right can be helpful, especially if you are having difficulty finding enough articles focused on your topic. Finding 1 or 2 good articles can easily lead to others.

Times Cited links to a list of articles that have cited this one. 

Cited References links to the list of articles cited in this one.

View Related Records links to a list of similar articles to this one.