Google Scholar

1.     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"].

2.     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).

3.     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"].

1.     Date-restricted searches can be effective when you are looking for the latest developments in a given area.

The menu item any time (on the left side of the page) removes all date restrictions from your search.

The Results Page for your search allows you to restrict your search to other periods.

For example:
Since 2016
Since 2015
Since 2012
Custom range...   (this option allows you to set a range by year)

2.    Some web sources don't include publication dates, and a date-restricted search will not return articles for which Google Scholar was unable to determine a date of publication. So if you're sure that an article about superconducting films came out this year and a date-restricted search doesn't find it, retry the search without the date restriction.

See the following links for additional help:

• Citation Export

• Content Coverage

• Inclusion and Corrections

• General Search Questions

Limiting searches by publication:

1.   Type the name of the publication within quotation marks in the search box, along with the other search operators,

i.e., "Black Music Research Journal" ragtime

The results will include documents published in this journal, as well as articles, books, etc. where this journal is mentioned (i.e., in the "References" or "Works Cited" portion).

2.   Publication-restricted searches may be incomplete. Google Scholar gathers bibliographical data from many sources, including automatically extracting it from text and citations. This information may be incomplete or even incorrect; many preprints, for instance, don't say where (or even whether) the article was ultimately published.

In general, publication-restricted searches are effective if you're certain of what you're looking for, but they‘re often narrower than you might expect.

For instance:
You might find that a search across all publications for [mutual funds] gives more useful results than a more specific search for "funds" only in the Journal of Finance.

3.     One journal can be spelled several ways (e.g., Journal of Biological Chemistry is often abbreviated as J Biol Chem), so you may need to try several spellings of a given publication in order to get complete search results.