anywhere in the article - will return a more complete set of articles related to your topic, but will also include more articles of less relevance because the term appears somewhere, but is not a major concept in the article
in the title of the article - will return a more focused, but smaller, set of results since terms in the title of an article tend to be major concepts in the article. Some relevant articles will be missed because the terms appear in the text, but not the title.
the "-" operator excludes all results that include this search term, as in [biomedicine -magnetic]
phrase search only returns results that include this exact phrase, as in ["as you like it"]
the "~" operator will find synonyms for that word, as in [~robotics]
the "OR" operator returns results that include either of your search terms, as in [soccer OR football]
the "intitle:" operator as in [intitle:mars] only returns results that include your search term in the document's title
the "author" operator [author:flowers] returns papers written by people with the name Flowers, whereas [flowers -author:flowers] returns papers about flowers, and ignores papers written by people with the name Flowers
using quotes around a common word makes sure your results include common words, letters or numbers that Google's search technology generally ignores, as in ["the" border]
Google Scholar automatically searches for simple singular and plural forms of terms you enter, along with additional different endings to some words, and for some related terms. For example:
- sport returns sport ; sports
- diet returns diet ; diets ; dietary
- woman may return woman or woman ; women ; female
