Research and Course Guides: Google Scholar Search Help: Search Tips

Search Document Type

Use the buttons below the basic search box to choose the type of documents you wish to find:

Articles - all documents covered by Google Scholar, except for case law
- Include patents or not
Case law - select case law across all jurisdictions or from particular state and federal courts

Where my words occur

In Advanced Search, search for your terms

anywhere in the article - will return a more complete set of articles related to your topic, but will also include more articles of less relevance because the term appears somewhere, but is not a major concept in the article
in the title of the article - will return a more focused, but smaller, set of results since terms in the title of an article tend to be major concepts in the article. Some relevant articles will be missed because the terms appear in the text, but not the title.

Tips

Use operators to refine your search terms. Google Scholar also supports most of the advanced operators in Google web search:

the "-" operator excludes all results that include this search term, as in [biomedicine -magnetic]
phrase search only returns results that include this exact phrase, as in ["as you like it"]
the "~" operator will find synonyms for that word, as in [~robotics]
the "OR" operator returns results that include either of your search terms, as in [soccer OR football]
the "intitle:" operator as in [intitle:mars] only returns results that include your search term in the document's title
the "author" operator [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
using quotes around a common wordmakes sure your results include common words, letters or numbers that Google's search technology generally ignores, as in ["the" border]

Related Term Searching

Google Scholar automatically searches for simple singular and plural forms of terms you enter, along with additional different endings to some words, and for some related terms. For example:

diet returns diet ; diets ; dietary
sport returns sport ; sports

The number of related terms included in the results may depend on the search being conducted. This feature cannot be turned off, and there is no separate truncation search that allows the user to designate that a term should be searched with any possible ending.