The Insanely Effective Way to Use Google Scholar

best Google Scholar search strategy start over on Google Scholar so if you are new to a certain field head over there and this is what I would do I would start playing around with the auto suggest so for example I can go in and I can go solar and then I go okay well I know I want to know about solar cells but let's have a look to see what sort of language they use so solar cells solar energy solar panels that's great so I'm going to type in solar cell and then I'm going to

start to see what kind of suggestions it sort of gives me this is going to tell me the best keywords that I can use in Google Scholar you see nowadays with all this AI fancy stuff that's going on we're quite often using semantic search like questions ideas to search but it is the OG of searching literature so you have to use keywords and this is a way you can kind of find out all of those so you go through and one thing I like to do is use the alphabet methods where I say okay solar

cell a applications and methods aray and I start taking note and saving these in an Excel document as to all of the things I I could potentially want to know about in the future after I've done a I use B I go B like this battery b or band Gap I don't know what a band Gap is so I'll put that into my Excel document or wherever I'm keeping these ideas then I'll go C and then I'll go characteristics capacitance simulator character or characterization that's something I need to know about this is how i' go

through I'd go through the entire alphabet using this system and start trying to get the language that is used in my field so that I can search around those terms if you're a little bit lazier you can head over something like Wikipedia where you can sort of like get the terms from the Wikipedia page of that area that you're searching so obviously I want to know about photovoltaic cells let's have a look I'll use photovoltaic I'll head over here put in photo volte and then I'll use that I'll use that same thing photovoltaics well that's

interesting but I'm going to go a applications array absorbers apparatus you get the idea this is how you start getting an idea of the appropriate Search terms that you need to use for a particular field um you can also just head over to chat GPT and say hey give me a listed keywords in the field of whatever let's do that right now chat GPT here we go give me a list of keywords in the solar cell field for Google Scholar so now what this will do is kick out a load of keywords that I could

potentially use to search so here we are photo voltech solar energy conversion thin film oh all of these are really really good so this is a really nice way of starting that broad search but once you're in Google Scholar with some results there's so much more than you can do not many people use these techniques the problem is too many people say Oh Google's scol I can't really use it but the problem is they don't know how to use it properly so here we go so I'm going to go in I'm just going to put

a little bit of a search here let's have a look at perovsky solar cell this is something I know a little bit about but not enough about so I'm going to go uh let's go review so I'm starting nice and Broad with a review article quite often there are many different um studies that are put together into one document that's a really really great place to start so I like to look at um here anytime since 2024 that will tell me about the recent advances in a field I really use this side a lot like

I use this and I also don't necessarily St by sort by relevance or dates sometimes I do if I want to know the newer stuff so let's say anytime sort by date here we are this is all of the stuff the newer stuff sorted by how relevant and recent they are fantastic this is where I would start now the thing is is that when people start um trying to understand the results they often get overwhelmed so here is how I would use it so first of all I am looking at the title of the paper

great obviously that's where we're starting but if certain names keep on popping up in a field so here are NG park that's interesting to me if they are underlined you can actually click on them and get their own Google Scholar search page and then all of this is now going to be very interesting to me because he's obviously a researcher in my field so remember to follow certain researchers remember here we are you can say follow here you can set up an email um every time this guy produces a paper so this is really really

important that you can click and follow authors that's the first thing thing that I would do another thing is if you are not getting the sort of results you like you need to start looking at the Boolean operators they are completely underutilized Boolean operators on on Google Scholar are and not or or and it's really really easy look let me show you over here so if I've got a certain search this is search term one let's say I'm looking for solar cell I'm just going to be SC but the problem is is so broad but

I want per off skes so I want that overlap so if I put in and and it has to be in capital letters or I put cand try to show you Capital that doesn't work at all let's get rid of that see it has to be in capital letters because otherwise it doesn't recognize it but we're only going to get this Slither so if you're getting stuff that isn't super broad you need to identify why and then remove that there that's the first step then if you're getting um stuff that is a little bit too

broad but there's some sort of like Fringe elements or like Google Scholar is a little bit confus use because the keyword is shared by a few Fields you can use not and what that does is give you this big call here but not the other search so search one and then this other phrase we want to get that out of our search so that's not and then the last thing if our searches are too specific and not really useful then I start using or because then you get two unrelated potentially fields that you get this

one and you get this one or combined together into one search so that is the three sort of Boolean operators you should be using because these are so so very important because uh not enough people sort of you know persevere through the learning curve which is Google Scholar you can also do this in other ways so once you've kind of found your um subject area and you're sort of exploring there are many ways that this can go these are the most important ones right down here is cited by if you click cited by what this

will do is give you another page which is more upto-date um papers that have cited that have referenced that particular study and then I like to go sort by dat and that will give me all of the best um most recent citations for this article and then you can see I can put search within sighting articles and then I can put another search in so Within These maybe I want Quantum dots and then you can see with in these citing articles that is what we got and then articles within the last year sorted by AB

racts or everything so this is a really important way of going out and sort of just sucking in like a basking shark swimming through the ocean open of science and research ah just getting all of the most important stuff and filtering out with your gills with your science gills uh all of the important information so let's go back to our original um search now one thing you'll notice is these quotation marks it automatically did this it put it in quotation Mar but if you are having too broad of a search and you want to really

sort of like hone in on something you are interested in and it's given too broad you can put it in quotation marks so here obviously it knows we want Prof Sky solar cell and then review so if I wanted um something else I could also you know use our Boolean operations and I could say like that and um I don't know PR solar cells and up what's it called conversion yes up conversion okay maybe oh here we are up conversion so this is how we start getting sort of like deeper and more Niche into our

subject area that's really really important then we've got other things down here let's go back um we've got related articles I use this a lot when I was doing my PhD and my post dooc because these are the related articles that it thinks um I would want to read so make sure you understand the buttons down the bottom what they do and then see some of these you can you know access this with PDF you can access this on HTML some of them don't have anything next to them which means that it may be a

little bit awkward uh to find the full text but if you click on all five versions sometimes you're lucky and you end up with a link to other stuff that may be useful uh to access the full paper this isn't going to be friendly to me today is it no but it's sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't um and another thing down here related searches this is where you can really get an idea of a research field based on the related searches Google wants you to find more information about what you're searching for and you

can see we can click on all of these and one thing I like to do is click on this and then open in background tab open this one open in background Tab and then I just work my way through the tabs looking at cited by looking for researchers and just really building up that kind of knowledge base that I should read from um and that is how I essentially sort out the roses from the Thorns is that the right saying I don't think it is but it doesn't matter um another really really unutilized part of

uh Google Scholar is this bit advance search click on this and you see this is automatically populated by my search but I want all of the words with review in it I want the exact phrase so that's the equivalent of putting in quotation marks um with at least one of the words so that's the or or or without the words so that's like the minus or the not these ones where my words occur anywhere in the article or in the title so that's really powerful if you really want to hone in on titles and that's

really important because a lot of researchers put a lot of effort into their titles to make sure they're searchable it really sort of like just make sure that you're really finding the most important stuff for your research authored by published in and I use this a lot articles dated between this and this and that's particularly important in fast moving Fields because you want the most up-to-date stuff so in solar cell technology I really don't want anything from like 2015 oh no these are 2015 to whatever so that is how I sort of like search uh

more in depth and not enough people actually click over on this little Sandwich Bar up here or Burger Bar I think it's called and head down to advaned search so that is how you sort of like find deeper and deeper um understanding I guess in your field if you like this video now you need to go check out this room I talk about how to use Google Scholar using Cutting Edge AI techniques I'm sure you'll love it go check it out all right good I think that was everything I wanted to get across thanks see

you in the next one