Google Scholar is a reputable database that is better to use for your research than the standard Google search. This is because Google Scholar draws from scholarly sources, whereas a Google search searches the entire internet.
That said, be wary of using Google Scholar as your only search engine for research. They don't share their algorithms to convey how results are found or ranked; searches rely on your cookies and search history, so they are not replicable by other searchers; their engine likes to ignore AND Boolean operators; and there is a search character limit, so it is challenging to copy/paste search strings from other databases into the Google Scholar search engine.
One of the flaws of Google Scholar is that it has very limited limiters. Once you have run a search, you can limit your results by publication year... and that's about it.
There are a few more options to narrow your results through the Advanced Search, accessed through the three lines to the left of the Google Scholar logo in the header of the page.
Do a search for the topic of interest, e.g., "knee replacement." Click the Envelope icon in the sidebar of the search results page, enter your email address, and click "Create alert". Google Scholar will then periodically email you newly published papers that match your search criteria.
Use the above link to create a Google Scholar Profile, which is free and quick to do. Once you get to the homepage with your photo, click "Follow" next to your name, select "New citations to my articles," and click "Done." Google Scholar will then email you when we find new articles that cite yours.
Search for the title of your paper, e.g., "Anti de Sitter space and holography." Click on the "Cited by" link at the bottom of the search result, and then click on the Envelope icon in the left sidebar of the search results page to Create an alert.
First, do a search for your colleague's name, and see if they have a Google Scholar profile. If they do, click on it, click on the "Follow" button next to their name, select "New articles by this author," and click "Done."
If they don't have a profile, do a search by author, e.g., [author:s-hawking], and click on the Envelope in the left sidebar of the search results page. If you find that several different people share the same name, you may need to add co-author names or topical keywords to limit results to the author you wish to follow.
Alerts are sent right after we add new papers to Google Scholar. This usually happens several times a week, except on holidays.
There's a link to cancel the alert at the bottom of every notification email.
If you created alerts using a Google account, you can manage them using the above link. If you're not using a Google account, you'll need to unsubscribe from the individual alerts and subscribe to the new ones.
Unfortunately, Google Scholar does not offer the option of exporting all article results. Instead, articles have to be selected one at a time, sent to the "My library" section, and exported from there.
As your scroll through your articles, you will see some have a "Cited by" icon located underneath them. Clicking on the "Cited by" icon will pull up a list of all articles that have cited the original work.
This is a wonderful way of finding research relevant to a topic, similar to using a paper's citation page to find which articles the author used. The main difference here is that when you use a paper's citation page, the articles listed are always going to be older than the publication. With the "Cited by" feature, you will get more recent publications on the same topic.
Google Scholar allows you to link TWU Libraries to your search! This way you aren't just searching Google Scholar, but you are also searching the holdings we have access to through TWU.
