Scholar gives users very limited control over searches. Depending on your searching project or topic, this may or may not appropriately fit your needs. Continue this page to learn how to tailor your Google Scholar search. If you would like more searching options, visit our Literature Searching and Scopus Basics guides or make an appointment with a librarian to learn how to use any of the library's databases.

Search by author

Use the work "author" as an operator followed by the author's name in quotation marks. Example - author:"erika thompson"

Search by exact phrase or title

Place phrase or title in quotation marks. Example -  "social determinants of health"

Boolean operators

Boolean operators are used to pull search terms together. They allow you to connect key terms in a format that is searchable in a database.  The most common Boolean Operators are AND, OR, and NOT.

AND

AND will narrow the search. It requires all terms connected by AND to be included in the search results. The example below reflects a search that requires both "diabetes AND nutrition" to be in the results.

OR

OR will expand the search. It allows for either term to be present in the search results. It is used for connecting synonyms of search topic key terms. The example below reflects a search that requires either "medication OR prescription" to be included in the results. It does not require both.

NOT

NOT is used to exclude terms from the search. Use caution when using NOT, as it may weed out items are relevant to the topic. The example below reflects a search that includes smoking cessation but does not include any articles that also talk about pregnancy.

Connecting Boolean Operators together

Sometimes, when you have a complicated research question, using multiple Boolean Operators in one search string can be helpful. In these instances, connecting different parts of the search string together using parentheses will help (it will resemble a simple math equation). Let's connect the first two examples above:

Example: (diabetes AND nutrition) AND (medication OR prescription)

In this example, the system will first look for articles containing "diabetes AND nutrition." It will then look through the results for articles that contain "medication OR prescription." So, we will only get results that have to do with medication as it relates to the nutrition of diabetic patients.

If we did not use parentheses, our search string would look like this:

Incorrect Example: diabetes AND nutrition AND medication OR prescription

Do you see the difference? In the incorrect example, the system will look for articles that contain "diabetes AND nutrition AND medication," as well as ALL the entries in the database that contain "prescription," whether or not they have anything to do with the first part of the search.