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:
bioterrorism OR biological weapons OR bioweapons OR biological warfare OR biowarfare
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.
Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism by 