How to use Google Scholar to find journal articles | Essay Tips

Any piece of research will involve a lot of searching through literature, particularly when you come to the stage of doing a literature review. There's going to be a lot of delving through bibliographic databases in order to find what research exists out there already. I've been doing a lot of this lately as I've gone back to do a bit more literature review work and I've been searching through again to see whether there is any new research that has popped up but, also, I think it's healthy, every so often, to go back and do another search through the literature because some articles or papers or books which might not have seemed relevant two months ago, since I've been doing more reading, might suddenly become absolutely vital to my project.

Today, I wanted to take a look at some methods for using online databases to do some really good literature searches. Now, there's many really good bibliographic databases out there. The one I use for my initial searches is Google Scholar.

Now, all of the various search engines tend to be imperfect in some way. There's some things they'll throw up that others won't and there's some things that they'll miss out. Google Scholar reaches into a few different bibliographic databases which is really, really useful because it gives really good overview.

Also, it's got some extra little functions which we'll talk about a little bit later on. So, the first thing that you can always do on Google Scholar is just use it like Google usually. So, at the moment, I've been doing a lot of research on city differentiation so, looking at what makes a city a global city or a metropolitan city or cosmopolitan city as opposed to a regional city or a non cosmopolitan city etc etc etc.

So, if I want to look up global cities I can very simply just type in "global cities". But the terminology in this field for "global cities" can often vary. So, sometimes they're called global cities but sometimes they're equally also called cosmopolitan cities, sometimes they're also called metropolitan cities.

So what I can start to do is, I can put in some boolean operators (so that's our "and" and "or" words) and I can put in "Global Cities" or "Cosmopolitan Cities" or "Metropolitan Cities". You can also use "and" but usually what Google Scholar will do is to assume an "and" if there's not a boolean there. But it does mean i can simplify the search by doing "global" or "cosmopolitan" or "metropolitan cities".

I can also equally do and "cities" or "city". I could also then do and "regional" or "non-metropolitan" or "noncosmopolitan". And that's going to suddenly bring my search results down and really refine it to some differentiation articles.

There are a number of other boolean operators you can use which can really help to refine your search. Particularly if you're in sciences and have to do a systematic review where you have to make sure you find everything on a particular topic, they can be particularly useful. But there's a couple of other tools on Google Scholar which I find incredibly useful.

So, recently I've been doing a lot of research around regional cities and globalization but what I'll quite often find is that lots of these articles will and be quite old. So, there's one here from 1999, another from 2000. And, actually, this is a field which moves very, very quickly.

So, Google Scholar gives us the ability to and refine our search by date. So if I want something really really recent, I can click and "since 2017" and I'll suddenly get articles which have only been published this year. Now, one of the great things about doing literature searches is that often literature will lead to literature.

If you've watched my other video where I talk about taking notes on literature, you'll know that I keep a To Read list as I'm reading any single a bit of literature. Which essentially allows me to follow the trail back to work that's referenced in a piece that I'm reading. The downside of that is if that trail only leads backward.

So it leads us from a piece that's written in 2017, say, to a piece that's written in 2010 and then a piece of literature from 2010 might then go back even further. So, a particularly useful tool in Google Scholar, and one that I only discovered particular recently, is that, underneath each result, there is a "cited by" button which essentially allows you to see any work that has cited that particular article. So, say I read this article "globalization as reterritorialization" and found it really really useful, but then I want to find work that is like that but is more recent, then I can click "cited by" and it will take me to all of the articles that have cited that article or book since.

Now, sometimes a citation might be quite loose and so an article citing another article might actually be quite off-topic. So another great function is the fact that Google Scholar allows us to search within those. So, if I really liked this article here I can then search for "regional cities" within the articles that have cited that previous article.

And this is a really really useful way of building really comprehensive literature lists for different topics. I've recently done it with both theatre and cities and theatre and globalization and it really helped me to have a really complete list of everything that exists on those topics so that I can have that to refer back to and use within my literature review to make sure that there's not any holes in what I'm doing. Finally, sometimes the links through from Google Scholar are a little bit off or sometimes they won't work so quite often I'll find that I have to go over to my University search engine and then search for particular article within the library article search there.

But actually, what Google Scholar is really useful for, is it is really great at finding work and then you might find that and you have to actually go and find it to read somewhere else. So, I tend to use Google Scholar more as a bibliographic finding tool, rather than for finding the links to the articles themselves. And the great thing, then, is that you can find the article and then bring it in to Mendeley or Zotaro or whatever the citation software is you use.

So, that's a few tips on doing a literature search for a thesis or dissertation or essay that you're working on. Do let me know if your system is different, if you've got any tips there are, as I say, some other boolean operators you can use, there are other bibliographic databases available which you may find are better and particularly for different subjects there will be bibliographic databases that are better for particular fields. If you've enjoyed this then please do give it a thumbs up or subscribe and I will be back on Tuesday with another video.

Thanks very much!