Help:Using Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a powerful external resource that can be used well in conjunction with content on this wiki. This article gives some suggestions for how this resource.

What Google Scholar stores
Google Scholar has agreements with publishers of many leading mathematical journals, whereby Google Scholar has permission to index many restricted-access journals. When you do a Google Scholar search, Google searches within all the journals that it has indexed, and returns relevant results within those. Remember that:


 * Not all journals are indexed by Google Scholar
 * Even for a journal that is indexed by Google Scholar, not all versions of the article may show up on Google Scholar
 * This is also true for related articles, articles by the same author, articles citing a given one etc. In all these cases, Google Scholar only returns those results that it has managed to index.

How to use Google Scholar
The primary advantage of Google Scholar is that it provides a single place to search a number of different scholarly journals. Secondly, Google Scholar also automatically recognizes local library settings, which means that if you are at a university whose local library stores a copy of the article, you'll get hints from Google Scholar to procure the article electronically through your local library.

Google Scholar can be used very effectively by specifying various operators.

General points about Google search

 * Words, separated by spaces or + signs, means Google will look for all the terms involved
 * To search only for an exact phrase, type the exact phrase in quotes
 * To do a OR search, type the various queries separated by OR (AND has higher precedence than OR). For instance if your query looks like:

blue red OR green

you'll get results which either have both blue and red, or have green.
 * You can also use the NOT operator, though this is rarely used.

Operators to Google Scholar search
Google Scholar search allows many operators. You can specify these operators using the Advanced Search, or you can specify them in the searchbox, using Google's syntax:


 * The author field: Specified as author:authorname, for instance, if you are looking for papers by Bush, you can type author:bush. The author field on Google differs from that on more organized databasees like Mathscinet; there may be multiple names for the same author. So you may have some articles published by "George Bush", some by "G Bush", etc. Similarly, two different people with the same name may be thought of as the same person as far as Google Scholar is concerned.
 * The title field: Specified as intitle:text, for instance, if you are looking for papers with the word "blue" in the title, you can type intitle:blue. Give the title in quotes, when looking for an exact phrase match. If you are looking for multiple words, each of which should be in the title, write allintitle: before the sequence of words. You might want to contrast:

intitle:blue red allintitle:blue red intitle:blue intitle:red intitle:"blue red"
 * The publication field: This field cannot be specified inline, and you need to use the advanced search. Just type the name of the journal in the publication field.
 * The date field: This feature is again not accessible inline, and you need to use the advanced search.
 * The subject areas field: Pick Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics. This may be particularly useful if you want to eliminate articles in other subjects where the same word is used with a totally different meaning.

Refining a Google Scholar search
After you make your first search using Google Scholar, Google will offer a number of helpful hints to refine your search. In a typical results page, you will see a list of authors on the left corner, so you can refine your search by including articles only by that author. In a green horizontal bar above the search results, you might see a button to click for Recent articles.

Moreover, with every article result, you see Cited by, Related Articles and Web Search: all extremely useful tools.

Integrating Google Scholar with Groupprops
Groupprops can be integrated fairly well with Google Scholar in a number of ways. Firstly, we have a number of search boxes on the wiki. The search box invites the reader to search for a particular term in a number of different places on the web; Google Scholar is one of those. You thus get a suggestion on how to get started in searching for a term on Google Scholar. You can, of course, refine the search term after seeing the initial results with Google Scholar.

We plan to have more features integrating Groupprops with Google Scholar. Provide feedback at Groupprops:Feedback/Search feedback.

Videos
These require a high-speed Internet connection.


 * Google Video on Google Scholar and Google Books
 * Youtube video on Google Scholar and JSTOR