Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
How does Google Scholar work?
Just as with Google Web
Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are
to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of
the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each
article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the
article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature.
Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and
presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are
not online. This means your search results may include citations of older
works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline
publications.
You can increase the accuracy and
effectiveness of your searches on Google Scholar by adding "operators"
that fine-tune your search terms. In some cases, you can add operators
right in the Google Scholar search box.
Here are the most common Google Scholar operators:
- Author Search
- Publication Restrict
- Date Restrict
- Other Operators
Author search
Author search is one of the most effective ways to find a specific paper.
If you know who wrote the paper you're looking for, you can simply add
their last name to your search terms.
For example:
The search [friedman regression] returns papers on the subject of
regression written by people named Friedman. If you want to search on an
author's full name, or last name and initials, enter the name in quotes:
["jh friedman"].
When a word is both a person's name and a common noun, you might want to
use the "author:" operator. This operator only affects the search term
that immediately follows it, and there must be no space between "author:"
and your search term.
For example:
[author:flowers] returns papers written by people with the name Flowers,
whereas [flowers -author:flowers] returns papers about flowers, and
ignores papers written by people with the name Flowers (a minus in front
of a search term excludes results that contain this search term).
You may use the operator with an author's full name in quotes to further
refine your search. Try to use initials rather than full first names,
because some sources indexed in Google Scholar only provide the initials.
For example:
To find papers by Donald E. Knuth, you could try [author:"d knuth"], [author:"de
knuth"], or [author:"donald e knuth"].
Back to the Resources for Teaching & Learning page.