Google Scholar is a free academic search engine, considered the academic version of Google. Instead of searching all indexed information on the web, Google Scholar searches the archives of reputable entities such as publishers, universities, and academic websites.
This is usually a smaller subset of the group that Google searches for. It’s all done automatically, but most search results tend to be trusted academic sources.
However, it is still important that users take some time to evaluate the reliability of resources linked through Google Scholar. In this article, let’s learn nTips for effective Google Scholar searcheshelps people gain information about reputable research.
Tips to make searching on Google Scholar more effective
Google Scholar searches are not case sensitive
People don’t need to worry about case sensitivity when using Google Scholar. In other words, searching for “Machine Learning” will produce the same results as searching for “machine learning”.
Use keywords instead of full sentences
Let’s say your research topic is about self-driving cars. For a typical Google search, people might enter something like a question about the issue. However, in Google Scholar you will see less than ideal results for this query.
The trick is to build a list of keywords and do searches for them like self-driving cars or driverless cars. Google Scholar will help with that, if people start typing in the search field, people will see related queries suggested by Scholar.
Use quotes to search for exact matches
If you enclose your search term in quotation marks, people can search for an exact match of that term in the document’s title and body. Without quotation marks, Google Scholar treats each word separately.
This means that if you want to search for national parks, the words won’t necessarily appear together. Grouped words and exact phrases must be enclosed in quotation marks.
Add year to find articles published in a specific year
For example, searching for “self-driving cars 2015” will return articles or books published in 2015.
Use the sidebar controls to adjust your search results
Using the options on the left panel, users can further limit the search results by changing the number of years searched, including or excluding patents, and sorting the results by relevance or by date.
