Google Scholar: Search tips

Tips for searching

Here are some tips for searching in Google Scholar.

• Author search. Use the author: operator, e.g. author:koon kwai wong. Generally a search by first name (or first initial), followed by the last name, returns better results.

• Title search. Put the title of the paper in quotation marks, e.g. "study on china's environment". The search engine will look for an exact word-for-word match of the words placed within the quotation marks.

More advice can be found on Google's own Google Scholar Search Tips.

Guide to search results

A quick guide to search results:

1. The article title links to the site where the article is hosted. In this case, the article is found on the publisher's site, Wiley Online Library.
2. The "cited by" metric indicates that 121 other articles indexed in Google Scholar have cited this paper. This link to citing papers is a way to discover other related articles in Google Scholar.
3. "Related articles" links to similar documents based on your search. You can see by the bolded text in the text preview that the search contained the words "academic success" and "libraries".
4. "All xx versions" links to other online sites that host information on this article, or a different version of the article.
5. The "cite" tool allows you to automatically generate a citation in one of the major styles, or allows you to export the citation to a bibliography manager.
6. The "save" tool allows you to save the citation to a Scholar Library account, to read later or for your own documentation.
7. And finally...Check full-text@HKBU ALMA enables you to link to the full text of the article licensed by Hong Kong Baptist University Library.