- Hi everyone, today I'm gonna talk to you about how to use Google
Scholar to do a review of scientific literature. Now, I like using Google Scholar
to do a literature review for a couple of different reasons. The first is that Google
does a pretty good job of indexing journals and
conference proceedings and databases, and finding
all of the relevant work that exists online. The second is that Google gives
us a couple of nifty tools that we can use to peruse the literature and discover new things as we're looking. So let me show you how to use Google Scholar with an example. Let's say that what we want to find in our literature review is about social eye gaze in robotics. So the first thing to
note is that you can use the same kinds of Google
tricks in the search bar here as you can during a normal Google search. This means that we can use capital OR to request a Boolean search. For example, OR virtual agents. It also means that we can use quotes to put a particular phrase... To search for an exact version
of a particular phrase. So here, this would search for
social eye gaze in robotics or the phrase virtual agents. So let's hit Enter. And we can see that Google
gives us a long list of results. And it gives us the title of the paper, the authors here who wrote the paper, an indication of where it was published, although this is often
hard to read, and a year. So you can go ahead and click directly on any of these links. This will take you to either
a PDF of the article directly, in which case there will
be a little PDF indication on the left-hand side of the title. Or it might take you to
a webpage of a conference or a journal that has published this work. And access to the article after that may or may not be behind a paywall. Google will also tell you
on the right-hand side here if the article is available
directly as a PDF. And if it is, it'll tell you what website is hosting that PDF. That's because sometimes
PDFs aren't hosted only by the journal or conference
that has published the work, but, for example, authors
might post the PDFs on their own personal pages. Now when you do a literature review, it's important to get a
wide range of research from a wide range of times. So you want to look for
work that is historical, that might've been published
a little bit longer ago, and also for more recent articles that really demonstrate the
state of the art in the field. So Google lets us filter the publication date of the
articles that we're looking for. So we can click since 2013, and find only articles
that have been published in the last four years. This helps us narrow down the scope to the most recent work. You can also define a custom range, if you wanna find work within
particular sets of years. Now if you read the references
from a particular paper, you'll be able to find relevant articles that were published before
that paper came out. But Scholar gives us a nice
way of finding articles in the future that actually cite the work that we're interested in. So, let's say, for example, that we have a particular
article that we like. And we wanted to know other research that has cited that article
that's interested in it. We can click on this cited by link, and that'll take us to a list of papers that have cited the article
that we are most interested in. Another nice tool is
that we can then click on search within citing articles and do an entirely new Google search inside the articles that are citing the article that we're most interested in. And this way you can really narrow down your topic of interest. So let's go back to the
main list of articles. Another useful tool that Google gives us is that it lets us, sometimes,
click on specific author names to find that
author's research profile. So for example, we can
click on my name here, and you can find a Google
Scholar profile which I set up with a picture of myself
and my affiliation. And Google automatically indexes all of the articles online
that are published by me. And they're automatically sorted by how often they've been cited, but you can also click on
year to sort by recency. And sometimes looking at the articles that a particular author has
written in the past few years might be informative in
developing your literature review. And finally, Google gives
us a nice way of citing, of figuring out how to
cite individual articles. So if you click on the cite
link beneath each article, you can see that you get the citations in a number of different
standardized formats. And in fact, if you
scroll down to the bottom you can also get the
citation in BibTeX format, which is a text format that you can copy directly into your bib file, which is especially helpful
for computer science students. I do recommend checking the citation over, because oftentimes Google
automatically generates it, and there may be some weirdness or errors in the way it has handled the
title or the journal title. So that was a whirlwind tour of how to use Google Scholar
to do a literature review. Please let me know in the comments if you use different techniques, or if you use other mechanisms
for finding literature when you're doing a
search of academic work. Thanks for watching.
