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Google Scholar Guide

Google Scholar Search Tips

Search Strategies

  1. Instead of whole sentences, use keywords.
  2. To get an exact match, use quotations.
  3. To find articles published in a specific year, add the year to the search query.
  4. Check the "Cited by" section to see if the paper was mentioned in other publications.
  5. To see related work, look under "Related articles" or "Cited by," or search for the author's name to see additional publications authored by them.

Use Boolean operator to better control your searches

AND - To combine descriptive keywords, use AND. This will narrow a search in which both terms must appear in the results.

NOT - Use NOT to filter out terms that aren't relevant to your search. This will help you focus your search.

OR - When you're looking for synonyms, OR comes in handy. This will extend your search and give you more options.

Advanced Search

 

To narrow your search to a certain category, use Advanced Search.

 

Author search: Enter one or more names in the "Return articles authored by" box to search for specific authors.

Journal title search: Enter the journal title in "Return articles published in" box to search for journals either by full title of abbreviations

Phrase search: Enter terms in the "with the exact phrase" box to search for the exact phrases. You can also use quotation mark to specify an exact phrase you want to search for or exclude in the other boxes.

 

Search for your terms anywhere in the full article or limit your search to terms in the title of the article.

  • anywhere in the article - you will get more complete set of articles related to your topic, but will also include more articles of less relevance because the term appears in any part of the document, but is not a major concept in the article
  • in the title of the article - you will get a more focused, but smaller, set of results since terms in the title of an article tend to be major concepts in the article. However, you may missed some relevant articles because the may terms appear in the text, but not the title.

 

Source : Google Scholar Search Tips (https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html#searching)