As a professional, you often need to research different topics. Your default strategy might be to Google the subject. But a regular Google search is often ineffective at showing the most detailed and reliable results to serve your research interest. 

There are particular multi-database gateways designed for searches related to academic research. The articles you find here are better sources of information for such needs. They also direct you to better sources of data. Some of these gateways are: 

1. Ebscohost
2. Web of Science
3. Proquest Direct
4. SCOPUS, etc. 

While most of them are subscription-based and aimed towards academic institutions, one search gateway that is free and simple to use is Google Scholar. Think of searching in Google Scholar as equivalent to searching in a library. Instead of public web content, you would only be browsing through scholarly articles, books, etc.

The following is a distinction between the search results I got for the same keyword in Google Search and Google Scholar:

The first result would be helpful if you are hungry. The second would serve you if you’re studying the noodle industry or the FMCG sector or want to know the shelf life of different kinds of noodles.

Although Google Scholar is free, the articles shown in the results may not be. Regardless, you will find several resources from open access journals. It means that while your search may not be perfect by academic standards, it would give you enough resources for your immediate professional needs.

The Search Process

Go to Google Scholar by typing scholar.google.com in the browser’s address bar or just searching for “google scholar” on Google search. The homepage looks like this.

Now, let’s say you are curious about Facebook’s metaverse and are interested in finding research articles on the topic. If you type “Facebook metaverse” in the search bar as you would in the regular Google search, it shows 2510 articles.

Search Results Interpretation

Now, let’s discuss what you can interpret from the search results. 

The first line of each result is the title of the article. In this case, it is “Facebook: Virtual or Virtueless Reality?”. Next comes the name of the author(s). Here, it is “V Bufacchi”. When there is a link attached to the author’s name, as is the case here, it means the author has a profile in Google Scholar, and you can check the other articles they may have published.

Next, we have the name of the journal or publisher “Irish Examiner”. Then comes the year of publication, 2021, followed by the link to the website. If you notice, there is a PDF file linked with this search result. It means that you can access the article here itself by clicking on the link. Not all the results allow that. 

The bottom menu has two key features – Save and Cite. You can use the Save feature to save the article in your library after logging in. The Cite feature provides a correctly formatted citation that you can use for citing the article in the desired style (such as MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, and Vancouver). This feature may be useful if you are publishing an article and want to cite this article for the ideas you have borrowed from it. 

If you notice, the first article has not received any citation, while the second article titled “Optimal Targeted Advertising Strategy For Secure Wireless Edge Metaverse” has received one. 

Customizing Your Search

Now, the 2510 search results are hard to navigate through. Let’s say you were only interested in articles published between 2017 and 2019. You can click on Custom range at the left panel and redefine the search period as 2017-2019.

Thus, we have limited the search results to 347 articles. You can further refine your search results by using logical operators or throwing in new keywords or exact phrases in the search bar. 

For example, the search ‘Facebook metaverse “augmented reality” social OR education’ would yield those articles that have the terms “Facebook”, “metaverse”, the exact phrase “augmented reality”, and one or both of the words “social” and “education” in them. Also, the search is case insensitive except the logical operators such as AND, OR, NOT, etc.

We get 132 results for the custom search range of 2017-2019. Next, you may want to read the titles and decide whether to read the article or not.

Advanced Search

A final search feature is the advanced search. Let’s assume you’re searching for a particular article you came across earlier. It was on a topic of your interest that had something to do with island tourism and ecological impact. All you remember is that it had the words “sustainable” and “island” in its title and one of its authors had the last name “Bhaduri”. How do you go about it from here?

Click on the little hamburger dropdown at the left top corner and click on Advanced search.

Fill in the details as you would like.

From this, you get a shorter list of results.

This approach can be used for more targeted searching.

How Reliable is Google Scholar?

Google Scholar has its limitations. Not every article the search results return are of the highest academic standards and reader discretion may be warranted. The first indicator of the quality of the article is the number of citations it has received by other articles. It’s a quick quality check but not a fool-proof indicator. An article published in 2021 will obviously be less likely to be read and cited by more people than an article published in the year 2010.

If you have time to assess further, then check the journal’s quality. The journal’s quality is indicated by how it is ranked in broadly-accepted journal ranking systems such as SJR (Scopus) or ABDC ranking (Australian Business Deans Council). Other direct measures for journal quality are metrics such as impact factor, h-index, etc.

This article is a brief guide to get you started with Google Scholar. For more detailed tips and tricks on using it, check out this guide. To truly realize the power of this tool, I’d encourage you to do some experimentation on your own. Happy searching!