GoogleScholar Search Tips from UMass Librarians
Fine Tuning Your Search
Using Operators
- To ensure that a term appears in the search results, place a "+" directly in front of a common word, letter or number
ex: urban housing +affordable - To exclude a term from the search results, place a "-" directly in front of a term
ex: urban housing -affordable - For results that include the exact phrase or title or name, use quotation marks around the terms
ex: “scholarly communication” - To include either one or another term in the results, place OR between terms
ex: automobile OR car OR motor vehicle - To include your search term in the document's title, use "intitle:" before a term for results
ex: intitle:intentional lifestyle
Author Search
- To find a paper by a particular author, add the author’s last name to your search terms
ex: garrison autism returns papers on the subject of autism written by authors named Garrison. - To search an author's full name, or last name and initials, enter the name in quotes
ex: “jk garrison” or “jerome karl garrison” or “j garrison” - To find a paper authored by someone whose name is also a common name, use the "author:" operator. Do not put a space between the operator and the name
ex: author:gold returns papers written by authors with the name Gold - To limit results to a common noun which also might be an author’s name, type in the term with a “-“ immediately before the author’s name, followed by the term again
ex: gold –author:glod returns papers about gold, and ignores papers written by people with the name Gold
Legal Opinions and Journals
Select the option marked Legal opinions and Journals on the homepage. The results pages offer a dropdown menu at the top. Select a collection to search (e.g. federal cases, Massachusetts cases, articles and patents).
Export Results to RefWorks
- Click on Scholar Preferences on the main search page
- Set the Bibliography Manager to Show links to import citations into RefWorks
- Click on Save Changes
Use the Advanced Search mode for a more controlled search template.
Last Edited: 18 August 2010
