How to Do an Advanced Search on Google Scholar

Last Updated: September 21, 2021

This wikiHow teaches you how to use Google Scholar's advanced search feature to get the most relevant academic search results. When you use Scholar's advanced search form, you'll have more control over the theses, books, articles, and other publications you see in your results. You can even search titles from specific authors, specify date ranges, omit word from results, and search only the titles. You don't need a Google account to use Google Scholar, but it'll come in handy if you want to save your favorite articles and create search alerts.

Steps

1
Go to https://scholar.google.com. You can visit Google Scholar in any web browser on any platform.
2
Click the three-line menu ☰. It's at the top-left corner of the page.

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3
Click Advanced search on the menu. This takes you to the advanced search form.
4
Specify your search terms in the "Find articles" section. The top portion of the window is where you can enter the words you want to search for or omit. Like everything else in the search form, you can fill in as many or as few of these fields as you wish:
- with all of the words: If you're looking for an article that contains multiple words, enter all of the words into this first blank. You'll only see results containing every word you enter here, including articles and prepositions.
- with the exact phrase: If you're looking for a specific set of words in order, such as an article title, name, or sentence, type it as it should appear in this field.
- with at least one of the words: This performs a broader search based on any of the words you enter into this field. For example, if you enter COVID Ibuprofen, this will return articles containing just COVID, just Ibuprofen, and both.
- without the words: If there are certain words you don't want to appear in the search results, enter those words here.
5
Choose which parts of the articles to search. In the "where my words occur" area, choose one of the following:
- If you want to search for your terms anywhere in the article, including the title, abstract, and body, select anywhere in the article.
- If you only want to search through titles, not other parts of the article, select in the title of the article. This is best when searching for a more common word or phrase that will appears in many articles but won't necessarily be relevant to your topic.
6
Specify an author name in the "Return articles authored by" field. If you want to search only articles written or contributed to by a particular author, enter that author's name into this field.
7
Enter a publication name into the "Return articles published in" field. This is useful if you only want to view search results from a particular journal, book, paper, or other publication.
8
Specify a date range in the "Return articles dated between" section. If you only want to see articles published within a certain time frame, enter the starting and ending years here.
9
Click the magnifying glass to search. This displays the results of your search.
- Use the links in the left sidebar to view publications within certain time frames, to toggle between sorting by relevance or date, or to include/omit patents and citations.
- To be alerted when new results are found based on your search criteria, click Create alert at the bottom of the left sidebar.
10
Click a result to view it. Options for viewing the publication will vary—sometimes you'll see the full text right away, other times you'll need to click a link to open the link through your regional or university library.
- Abstracts are typically free to read, but the full text may require a subscription or library membership.^{[1]
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- If there's a freely-available PDF version of the article you can download, click the PDF or Download link to save it to your computer.
- To find out if there are other places to get the article, click the back button to return to the search results, and then click All versions below the article (if available) to see other sources.
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