To find relevant research papers, journals or articles published by researchers or other people, you may need to search for the citations with multiple keywords. Of course, Google Scholar seems to make it easier for people to find some sorts of relevant publications at one time.
However, there’s a certain rule you need to meet when searching for citations on Google Scholar with multiple keywords. If you fail to search for citations with multiple keywords, you may be wrong in entering those keywords. So, you can dive into our post to find the guide. Here you go!
Searching for Citations on Google Scholar with Multiple Keywords?
You can really search for citations on Google Scholar with multiple keywords. To do it, you need to use “Double Quotation” marks to search for citations with multiple keywords next to each other in the specified order.
Here are the examples of multiple keywords you can search for citations at one time:
- “Global warming” or “the impact of global warming on animal”
- “Climate change” or “the impact of climate change on animal”
- “Best food for diet” or “food for diet” or “food for diet comparison”
The point is, you need to always use “Double Quotation” to search for citations in Google Scholar. If not, Google Scholar will automatically combine multiple words with the operator AND.
The advantage of searching for citations with multiple keywords in Google Scholar is to make it easier for you to find some sorts of articles that are related to your search. Keep in mind, using multiple keywords is also one of the ways you can improve your searching.
How to Improve Your Searching in Google Scholar?
In addition to using multiple keywords, there are also some tips and tricks you can take to improve your searching in finding some sorts of research paper, journals, articles, etc related to your search.
Okay, here are the following tips to improve your searching in Google Scholar:
1) Use the Advanced Search option
If you want to search for citations in specific ‘fields’ or to limit results by year range, you can use the Advanced search option that you can find in the menu. Even though those options will not work optimally, it can really help you to limit the number of results.
2) Include alternative terms
You can search for citations by using the OR operator to include alternative terms. With the use of OR operator, you can really combine those terms and find more. In some cases, Google Scholar does not include obvious synonyms in your search.
Instead of OR you can also use | (a pipe) for example: “heart|myocardial infarction|attack” to find myocardial infarction, heart infarction, heart attack and myocardial attack.
3) Exclude specific terms
You can also use the – operator to exclude specific terms. Of course, you can exclude as many terms as you want, for example: mercury –ford –freddy –outboards –planet.
4) Use Allintitle
You can also limit your search to terms that appear in the title only, for example” allintitle:”agaricus bisporus”.
5) Use Filetype
In addition to using Allintitle, you can also limit your search to specific file types by using filetype: or ext: for example: “agaricus bisporus” filetype:pdf.
6) Site
You can also limit your search to specific websites or domains. This way is very beneficial for websites without good search options. For example: “plant diseases” site:journals.plos.org. If you are searching within specific domain extensions, you can limit your search by country or type of institution. For example: “plant diseases” site:.edu (academic institutions in the USA).
7) Combination
You can also limit your search by combining all of the above to do more precise searches. For example: allintitle:“carbon dioxide” OR CO2 -phosphorus ext:pdf site:.edu
8) Personalization
You can also limit your search by personalizing your search through Settings and use other handy features of Google Scholar. For example: create literature alerts, make your own library of references (called My Library), or allow Google Scholar to show import citation links to EndNote or another reference manager. Of course, you need to login with your Google account to use these options.
Pros and Cons of Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a very useful search engine for scientific literature which is used by a lot of researchers and students. However, Google Scholar is particularly beneficial to find and access publications that you already know, or to perform a quick search on a topic.
Google Scholar is less beneficial as you want to gain an overview of literature on a particular topic, for example, for your thesis or literature review. That is due to Google Scholar offering limited options to combine multiple search terms with Boolean operators (like AND, NOT, OR).
By default, Google Scholar will look for the full text of publications. The Advanced searching will allow you to limit your search to specific fields (title, author, a certain journal and date). However, you cannot limit your search to, for example; title, abstract and keywords fields only.
The selection that Google Scholar makes for you is not transparent. It will rank the search results and display only the first 1,000 results of any search, based on algorithms that Google changes frequently. The ranking will depend on settings which you may be unaware of, such as your language settings or location.
To gain an overview of scientific literature on a particular topic. Thus, it would be better for you to use a bibliographic database. Of course, you can find out how to select the best databases for your subject.
How Worth Is Advanced Search on Google Scholar?
Advanced search on Google Scholar is a perfect way to search more recent posts. With the use of Advanced Search on Google Scholar. It actually follows a concept from its initiation to the present day and also will restrict the number of findings which are cited.
So far, the Advanced Search feature on Google Scholar is really worth using to limit your search, so you can find the research papers, journals, articles, etc that you are searching for.
