Google Scholar for Academic Research | Top Research Strategies For College Students

what's up guys welcome back to the smart student my name is chelsea seburn do me a favor let me know how you're doing below i'm feeling chatty today because i'm excited we've got a lot of good stuff to cover in this video so up to this point i've been covering google scholar giving you everything you need to know about what google scholar is and how to use it we're going to ride further on how to use google scholar train today because we're going to get into the advanced tips and that's exactly what we're going to do is go through the advanced search feature in google scholar and i'm going to teach you exactly what it is and how to use it effectively first i wanted to show you this pdf downloadable google scholar template i don't know what you'd call it it houses all the information i've covered in these last few videos there's a link to it in the description completely free don't know if i said that but with no further ado let's jump into my computer and get this party started and here we are welcome to my computer so what we're going to do is first we're going to come up with a list of keywords to bring to google scholar and then we're going to start going through each of those advanced search features okay so let me minimize myself here so we can still see me yay there i am all right so what you're looking at on the screen is just a basic topic let's say you're taking an education course you're in a social science degree whatever the case may be and your topic is something along the lines of the impact time management skills have on success in higher education so right away i want you to ask yourself what are the keywords associated with your topic because quite frankly i can pick out three now you can pause the video if you want to think about it but because we're time sensitive i'm going to go ahead and just say that the three different keywords you have here is time management success and higher education so what i mean by coming up with the list of keywords is you want to come up with some very variable keywords that you can use in place of some of these because that's going to give you more options to search using google scholar and now i'm going to go ahead and reveal everything here and we can talk about it and then let's see here black okay so as i said those are the three keywords you have higher education success time management first thing i want you to note is how next to the first two i have the word variable and next to time management i have non-variable here's why i have that there so for example higher education that's a variable keyword because well there's a handful of other keywords you might may be willing to accept in its place same with success there's a lot of determinants for what that can mean now the reason that time management is a non-variable keyword is that time management is going to remain relatively constant through all the different searches you perform on google scholar because you're researching the impact of time management now time management you might find a specific time management strategy that you want to research that's fine then you may plug in another keyword here but for the time being time management that kind of has to stay the same but now that you have this list of keywords this is a good time to go ahead and hop on google scholar which is exactly what we're going to do right now so here we are at the home page now the first thing i want to do is see if you can relate to this little because oftentimes this is the first search college students will do you have a topic so what do you do you go to google scholar and you search for that topic you search for the entire thing what impact does time management skills have on success in higher education so a couple things i want to point out first i want you to note that there's over 5 million results under this search that's not the issue though however the issue is within the results that are returned they're all over the place so unless you're doing preliminary research and you really have no idea which route you want to take your topic yet this type of search is not helpful to you remember google scholar is different than google it doesn't need all the fluff so now the first thing i want to do is i want to refine this search appropriately for google scholar for the first time so here we might leave time management and let's say higher education because that's going to be the most broad scope of this topic this is really the main topic in the most broad zoomed out version we want to see of it so no that actually brought our results up to over 6 million however that's not necessarily a bad thing because now the quality of our results are much more pinpointed at what we're looking for so we have time management skills academic performance part of me we have college students talking about their academic stress here we have strategies for success in education so note how even though we didn't put in our third keyword it's already headed that direction so so far the conversation with google scholar is going well we're speaking its language but we do want a little more control over the conversation now we're going to go ahead and bring up the advanced search feature so first thing i want you to note is that time management and higher education is already in the advanced search feature that's because we're in the middle of a search right now now if you have never used this before and you're not sure how it works the first thing i want you to note is that there are words and phrases that are bolded throughout the different options basically the word or phrase is a summary of what that function does so right here we have with all of the words all is bolded which means that google scholar understands that you want all of these words returned in your search results in no particular order because of that that's why this is going to be your most broad search but as we continue researching let's say that we want to be a little more specific in our results so now let's move down to the second option available which is the exact phrase note how exact phrase is bolded because that's telling you what this option does is google scholar is going to return results that have the exact phrase listed right here so going back to our keywords let's look at our variable keywords now we want to move on from higher education maybe we want to see what returns when we talk about let's say let's say graduate yeah let's go ahead and go down here we're going to erase higher education and now we're going to return graduate degree all right so what this is telling google scholar is that you want articles that have all of these words but it must contain the exact phrase graduate degree so let's hit search first thing i want you to note is that notice how we no longer have 6 million results we have 100 150 000 results so that significantly shrunk down our options also note how the word graduate degree is put in quotations double quotations that is simply the boolean operator for exact phrase match and now i have other videos on that which i'll link around this screen somewhere right now so you're welcome to watch those but that is simply the bullion operator for exact phrase match as you're reading through these articles note that you can continue to refine this so let's say now we want to look for phd instead of graduate that increased your results to 3 million so that tells you there's a lot of research based on phd students so you might want to take it that route because there's more information or even let's say that you want to put in master's degree let's see we pull up when we have master well that was master there's master's master's degree you have almost 2 million so this is fun to play around with when you're trying to decide which route you want to go when you're starting to get more specific now i actually have a really really cool tip for you and that is if you want to find credible sources using google scholar let's say you want to look for peer-reviewed sources using the exact phrase match is an awesome way to do that because if you type in peer reviewed for example now google scholar is going to return articles that are associated with time management but are also half the phrase peer reviewed so that's a really cool strategy in my opinion but now let's go ahead and go back into the advanced search feature here we go so let's go ahead and take out peer reviewed now the situation is you want to stick with time management because that's your non-variable keyword but after doing some of those basic searches you're unsure about which route you want to take master's doctorate phd as you can see i've already typed these in before so what you do is you include them in the third option which is with at least one of the words so note in this area at least one is what's highlighted because this advanced search is going to tell google scholar that all results must contain time management however you're flexible as to the second keyword it returns it can contain time management and masters time management doctorate time management phd time management master's in doctorate you get the picture you're a little more flexible here so let's go ahead and perform this search and here we have almost 4 million about halfway actually but we have a lot of results that have come back but i want you to pay attention to what is in the search bar we have time management masters or doctorate or phd again that's reflecting boolean operators that's exactly what the advanced search feature is is using bullion operators in google scholar so let's go ahead let's see what else we can do all right the next one says without the words and this is a very effective search strategy but often when you don't know you need until later on so for example we're searching for time management and higher education all right we perform that search the words here are time management higher education google scholar is returning results that also contain high schoolers because it's kind of similar and you haven't specifically told google scholar that you don't want to talk about high school so that would be an effective keyword to put in without the words because now google scholar knows oh okay we're talking about higher education only you don't want high school i will leave all results that contain high school and areas related to that out of your searches that's pretty cool huh by the way if you are finding this helpful don't forget to like this video subscribe to the channel so i can keep making more tutorials like this for you guys but now what i want to do is i want to use a few of these features together all right so if this were me and that were my topic here is how i would approach google scholar i would leave time management in the first option because that's my non-variable keywords all of my results must refer to time management the reason i'm not putting it in exact phrase however is because it's not so specific that i only want google scholar to give me articles that say time management maybe if i find a specific type of time management i want to research later say time batching or a certain planning method i might put that into exact phrase later but for right now i'm going to put my non-variable time management in the first option now let's say that i am not entirely sure which route i want to go but i'm looking for higher education i'm not specific on the exact degree i can kind of use the entire top portion that's what i'm going to put these keywords back into at least one of the words because i'm flexible there these are my variable keywords there's a few different routes that i can look at and so i'm going to leave that there i'm also going to leave high school here as well because i know right away i don't want any results that return high school so google scholar can leave those out now i may go ahead and start in search with that and as i can see here this is narrowed down quite a bit i see a lot of phd time management masters so i'm already in a really good neighborhood of resources let's say however that i really i really want to return just the most credible sources i want them all to be peer-reviewed i might go ahead and put peer-reviewed in the exact phrase match because i know that's the type of research and articles that i need for this paper so that brings it down a lot more now we only have 15 000 results so here we're getting very specific on the type of results we're finding and so what i would do is i would go through some of these see if i find something see if i can refine further see if i need to broaden it because maybe that's too specific as you can see there are a lot of ways you can structure your search queries i do want to touch on these few in the bottom even though they're kind of self-explanatory so note how where my words occur there are two options anywhere in the article and then in the title of the article those are exactly what it sounds like and that's why the default is anywhere in the article because this all needs to be contained and you're not particular it just needs to be somewhere in the article let's say that you only want it to be in the title this you're going to want to get rid of a lot of these keywords because obviously if all those criterias you only wanted them in the title you probably wouldn't return many results but let's say time management and college students i only want to find articles that contain those keywords in the title now you can see that's exactly what google scholar understood college students time management college students time management you have time management college students college students time management because what you told google scholar is you want those keywords in the title in no particular order now you can also use google scholar to search by author perhaps there's a popular well-respected author in your field of research you can quite literally type in their name here and sift through their articles only i don't have one off the top of my head for time management college students but if you have one in your field you can go ahead and use that you can also search for a specific journal this option is great because this allows you to search in specific publications and then finally you also have the ability to return articles dated between and then you can put in a time range this is especially helpful when you want to make sure that your research is timely so you may be researching a topic that is either time sensitive or you're finding that your results are not within the last five to ten years and so you want to bring your results to something more current this is really helpful in helping you do that what do you think was that helpful enjoyable at the very least i'm gonna say it was enjoyable for my self-esteem don't forget though to download the free google scholar downloadable and save it on your computer so you can reference it later and i say it every time but go down below let me know how you're doing today where you're from in the world getting to know my subscribers is my favorite part of having a youtube channel so comment down below there's a good chance i will comment back and with that i'll see you next time

Channel: Smart Student

Views: 14,406

Keywords: google scholar search, google scholar search tips, google scholar, advanced search feature, boolean operators, google scholar advanced search, how to use google scholar advanced search, google scholar advanced search tutorial, peer reviewed google scholar, google scholar tutorial youtube

Id: CmQzH_jPads

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 24 2022