Searching in Google Scholar is just as easy as in regular Google: you enter one or more terms in the search bar and you will see results.
To increase the chance of more relevant results for you, you can apply several tips:
You can do an advanced search in Google Scholar in two ways:
In the example, we are looking for articles published since 2018 on the factors influencing consumers' online buying behavior. You can fill the search window as following:
The search engine makes automatically the following search string:
Notice: You do not see an AND operator in the search string above. That's because every space in Google is an 'AND'!
What is a search string?
A search string is a combination of the main terms (from your query) and their synonyms, connected by operators AND and OR, and where possible made 'smart' by applying search techniques, such as quotation marks and round brackets.
With a search string, you can search in any search engine or database.
Using search string:
We are still looking for articles on the factors influencing consumers' online buying behavior.
A possible search string is:
("consumer behavior" OR "buyer behavior" OR "buying behavior") AND ("online shopping" OR "online buying" OR "online retail" OR "web retail") AND (factors OR impact OR influence)
The results in the search engine look like this:
In Google Scholar you can easily search with one or more search terms or a search string.
Please note that a full-text search is automatically performed.
This means that the search engine searches in all fields (title, author(s), the title of the journal, etc.) and the full text of the article. So you usually get a lot of results, but they are not necessarily all relevant to you.
In most databases, you can indicate that you want to search with the search term(s) or search string, for example in the summary or the keywords. This makes the number of results less, but more relevant.
Each search result in Google Scholar has a bar with various options.
Here's what you can do for each result:
"My library"
Citing