How To Conduct A Literature Review Using Google Scholar Step By Step Guide

A free academic search engine known as Google Scholar (GS) is sometimes referred to as the academic counterpart of Google. Instead of searching all of the online content that has been indexed, it searches publisher repositories, academic databases, or scholarly websites.

Typically, a smaller portion of the pool gets searched by Google in this manner. Even though everything is done automatically, the majority of search results come from trustworthy academic sources. In contrast to highly moderated subscription-based academic databases like Scopus and Web of Science, Google is also less selective about what it includes in search results, therefore it is important to determine the authority of the sources linked through Google Scholar on your own.

When conducting thorough searches, such as systematic reviews, Google Scholar (and Web of Science) shouldn’t be used as a stand-alone resource for locating evidence and finding: Title searches rather than full-text searches in Google Scholar get much more results for ancient literature.

When you are going to complete a literature review, it’s essential to collect research information from many domains and eras, and google scholar is helpful in that regard.

Now, there are a few different reasons why I prefer using Google Scholar while conducting a literature review study.

The first is that Google does a reasonably good job of discovering all of the relevant work that is available online and indexing journals, conference papers, and research databases.

Read:

• Citataion
• i10-index
• Hi-ndex

The second is that Google provides us with a few useful tools that we may use to browse the literature and find new information as we search.

Read:

• Tools for Automatic Referencing
• Free Online Citation Generator Tools

In order to show you how to use Google Scholar, allow me to give you an example. Consider that our literature review is looking for information on social eye observation in robotics.

Step By Step Guide of using Google Scholar for Literature search

Step 1: Type “Google Scholar” into the search bar and click and find the google scholar dashboard  

Note: The first thing to keep in mind is that you may type “google scholar” in the search field and use the same Google tactics as you would when conducting a regular Google search.

Step 2: Now you can search any topic of your interest on the search bar of google scholar For example, you can Search Fish farming by typing the word in the search bar and clicking the enter button.

Note: Add the word(s) in question to the search tab and press Enter to look for the exact phrase. And it’s clear that Google provides us with a lengthy list of results with the same outcomes. Additionally, it provides us with the paper’s title, the authors who wrote it (although it can be difficult to see on other platforms), where it was published, and the year (see above screenshot) So feel free to click on any of these sites immediately and find the articles details.

Despite these details, Google Scholar Dashboard will also indicate on the right-hand side of this page whether the article is directly available as a PDF (see above screenshot). If so, it will also let you know which website is hosting the PDF. This is due to the fact that PDFs aren’t always hosted by the journal or conference that published the work; instead, writers may upload the PDFs on their own personal pages, for instance.

If you want to find older works that may have been published a little while ago as well as more recent publications that really show the recent R&D in the field of the subject selected.

Step 3: Google scholar allows us to search for articles based on their publication date and years and if you wish to restrict our search, you can search articles starting in the year (as shown below ) 2022, we will only see paper those that have been released in the selected years and this aids in limiting the scope to the most recent work.

As shown above, we are obtaining all 2022 academic research papers (shown in the above screenshot) that have been published in that particular field, complete with source information If you wish to look for research within specific timeframes, you may also build a custom range of your search.

Now, if you read the references in a certain paper, you can locate pertinent articles that were released earlier than that paper. But google scholar offers us a convenient way to locate publications citation and cite scores (see inside the red circle in below screenshot)

Note: If you are enjoying a specific research article and also wanted to see whether there was any additional research that was interested in it and had cited the publication. To view a list of publications that have mentioned the article we are most interested in, click the “cited by” (as shown in the red circle of below screenshot) link and see results and use these papers for your literature review.

Step 4: Google Scholar also offers the ability to automatically generate references, and you can easily obtain several citation types or styles by simply checking the cite button and finding the results as displayed below screenshot.

As mentioned above, you can find references for citations in several citation formats. To use them, just copy and paste the references into your written document’s references area.

Read:

• Citation Writing Pattern
• How to Increase Your Citation

You can see that you may acquire the citations in a variety of different standardized formats by clicking the cite link that is located beneath each article as shown in the picture above.

In fact, if you read down to the bottom, you may also find the citation in BibTeX style (see in the red circle below screenshot) a text format that you can copy and paste directly into your bib file, which is particularly useful for students studying computer science field.

You can also use one more useful feature of Google Scholar is the ability to conduct a fresh Google search inside the articles that are quoting the article we’re most interested in by selecting “search within citing articles” from the drop-down menu. And by doing so, you can significantly hone in on your area of interest.

Step 5: Google scholar dashboard also provides us with the beneficial feature of occasionally being able to click on individual author names to access that author’s research profile.

As an illustration, by clicking on my name (Koshal Kumar) here, you can find a Google Scholar profile which I set up with a picture of myself and my affiliation and citation I received till date (see below red circle) and Google automatically indexes all of the articles online that are published by me.

In this way, you can find the literature you want, and google scholar is also automatically ordered by how frequently they have been cited, but you can manually sort by recency by clicking the year or by author name and titles of the paper. Additionally, it might occasionally be helpful to research recent works by a particular author while building your literature review, and finally, Google provides us with a convenient way to cite, allowing us to determine how to cite specific articles.

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.

This is all about this article, and we sincerely hope that these steps and advice of using google scholar in the literature review will be useful to you as you are going to search for literature review online in your journey of research and you are familiar with the online literature review process. KressUp is an online learning platform that occasionally publishes new articles; stay connected to more updates

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