How and why to use Google Scholar and co. Tips and tricks - Silvan Christen, Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften, UB Bern

How and why to use Google Scholar and
co.
Tips and tricks

Silvan Christen, Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften, UB Bern
Coffee & Bit(e)s fall 2019

General search engines
 Why are they insufficient for science?

Reach only part of the Web      Scientific documents often remain
(visible web/surface web)       hidden in databases and
                                library catalogues

Even open access publications
not indexed entirely               Suitable hits disappear in
                                   the huge result list
     Poor ranking and sorting
                                                                    https://medium.com/@smartrac/the-deep-web-the-dark-web-and-simple-things-

                                     Unspecific search options      2e601ec980ac

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Scientific search engines
  Why to use them?

  Search the deep web and index                   Free access for searching (≠ commercial
  scientifically relevant information             databases)

      Documents in other languages             Many open access documents
      than English                             indexed

Some scientific search                                              In some cases cooperations
engines also index paid-                                            with academic publishers (full
                              Relevance ranking: incl.
for publications                                                    text indexing)
                              scientific metrics (e.g. citations)
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Google Scholar
Advantages

•   Wide range of sources and literature types incl. (journal papers, theses, preprints, etc.)
•   Includes freely available full texts and paid-for publications
•   Interdisciplinary scope
•   Indexes the full text (mostly) or metadata of scholarly literature
•   Indexes also the references (citation analysis)
•   In comparison to Scopus and Web of Science: higher comprehensiveness and
    uniqueness (data from institutional repositories) (Tsay et al. 2019)

                                Tsay, M., Tseng, Y. & Wu, T. Scientometrics (2019) 121: 1323. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03252-3
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Google Scholar
Disadvantages

•   Selection of sources done by algorithms, not intellectually
•   Sources remain intransparent
•   Limited search options (important: no filter for publication types!)
•   Google’s search algorithms ≠ «academic databases» (e.g. Web of Science)
•   Intransparent relevance ranking (citations count a lot)
•   Unmanageable number of results
•   Huge variation in scientific quality of documents (also grey literature, such as preprints,
    term papers, master theses, ppt presentations, etc.)
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Google scholar
A colorful mix of publication types

Example: Gentrifizierung Berlin

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Google scholar
Search tips I

•   Use the advanced search: author, title, time range, etc.

•   Limit time range (but still sorted by relevance!)

•   Sort by date (only articles added in the last year)
     normal sorting by time not possible

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Google scholar
Search tips II

•   Personalize your search (Settings)
•   Install the GS button (Settings  Button)
•   Keep words together: e.g. «water management»
•   Careful with relevance ranking: strong correlation with
    citation counts  older articles higher ranked
•   Enable off-campus access (Settings  Account)
•   Personal account: claim your publications, GS provides you with
    metrics like citations, create alerts
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BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
Advantages

•   Freely available full texts (~60% of all indexed documents)
•   Interdisciplinary scope
•   Includes only document servers of high academic quality and relevance
•   Sources are intellectually selected and made transparent
•   Rich and precise bibliographic data (metadata) are provided
•   Several options for sorting and refining the result list

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BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
Disadvantages

•    Paid-for publications of commercial publishers generally not covered
•    Search within document’s full text is not available

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BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
Demonstration

https://www.base-search.net/

Video about BASE (German):
http://blog.bibliothekarisch.de/blog/2018/08/01/wissenschaftliche-recherche-
datenbanken-und-deep-web/

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BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
Search tips

•    Create a personal profile and claim the authorship of a publication, add favorites and
     save your search history permanently

•    Plural, genitive and other word forms will be searched automatically. To disable: Choose
     „Verbatim search“

•    Use the advanced search and the options for sorting and refining the results

•    Use the search option „Check in Google Scholar“ to access full texts via GS

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Scientific search engines
Disadvantages

•    Sometimes poor metadata quality: may lead to problems in processing the search queries
•    In some cases limited search options (e.g. poor filtering options or Boolean operators
     don’t work properly)
•    Intransparent ranking
•    In some cases no distinction of publications of different type and quality: journal articles,
     preprints, postprints, reports, term papers, etc. appear all together mixed in the result list
•    Scientific quality of documents: varies significantly
•    Search results can be incomplete / inexact
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And there are many more…
 … scientific search engines
  Microsoft Academic                           OAIster
                           ScienceResearch

World Wide Science                             FreeFullPdf
                       Core
                                    OpenAIRE

OpenGrey               Paperity              Q-Sensei Docs

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… and bibliographic databases

Video about the difference between a bibliographic database and a (scientific search engine):
http://blog.bibliothekarisch.de/blog/2015/07/15/was-ist-der-unterschied-zwischen-
suchmaschine-und-datenbanken/

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Scientific search engines
Conclusions

•    Cannot replace the specialized (subject) databases with their curated peer reviewed
     publications, high-quality metadata and various search options
•    However, they can be a valuable additional source for literature search and are useful for
     getting a first overview and finding one specific publication
•    Useful for finding open access publications, grey literature and non-English documents
•    Google Scholar is widely used (especially among students?) but has several
     disadvantages
•    BASE as alternative (sources, metadata quality, search options): focus on open access
•    Try to use different scientific search engines but be always careful and critical!
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Thank you
for your attention
Silvan Christen, Fachreferat Naturwissenschaften, UB Bern
Coffee & Bit(e)s fall 2019

      www.unibe.ch/ub/sciencelibrary  see «Coffee & Bit(e)» for lecture notes

Next coffee lecture
@ GIUB

Rating scientists based on articles and citations
Can publications be used to measure scientific achievement?
Dr. Nuria Plattner, UB Bern
27th November
GIUB, Hallerstr. 12, coffee room 308, 15:15-15:30

Questions?

             https://digitalsynopsis.com/tools/google-serp-design/
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More search tipps
Google Scholar I

•    GS automatically inserts the operator AND between every word/phrase/set of brackets 
     you don’t need to type it. Instead of typing the operator OR, you can just insert | (“Alt Gr”
     7). AND/OR must be in capitals.

•    Finding documents in PDF format  add filetype:pdf to your search terms

•    Google Scholar doesn’t recognize truncation symbols. Instead, it uses automatic
     stemming. It means that it looks for the word you type in, plus any additional letters on the
     end of that word. Example: military would find the words military, military’s, but not
     militarism, militaristic.

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More search tipps
Google Scholar II

•    To find references containing an exact word such as military, with no variations  add a +
     sign immediately before the word or use quotations marks. Example: +military “military”

•    By adding – the word is excluded from the results (should not appear in the results).
     Example: Switzerland -Zurich

•    Google Scholar appears to search automatically for synonyms related to the words in
     your search strategy. But the results are often erratic. You better search synonyms by
     separating them with a | sign, and to bracket them, i.e. (heart|cardio). (| = “Alt Gr” 7)

                                     (Source: http://uregina.libguides.com/content.php?pid=213391&sid=1780804)
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More search tipps
BASE

•    The * (asterisk) substitutes any number of characters. It is used to find different spellings
     or wordings even in different languages in one go. Example: algebr* geometr*. If you use
     asterisks, the automatic search for word forms or synonyms will be disabled. The asterisk
     can not be applied in phrase searches.
•    Boolean Operators
      • A and B  Example: linear algebra
      • A and/or B  (linear algebra)
More: https://www.base-search.net/about/en/help.php

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