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Advanced Library Search Strategies

Learn how the professionals search for articles, books, and other scholarly works through citation chasing and optimal keyword searching. This guide accompanies the Savvy Researcher workshop, "Advanced Library Search Strategies."

About Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a free search engine that indexes scholarly literature from a wide variety of sources, formats, and disciplines. This index includes peer-reviewed academic materials, conference papers and proceedings, dissertations and theses, as well as court opinions and patents.

Citation Chasing in Google Scholar

Forward

  1. Navigate to Google Scholar - make sure you are actually in Google Scholar, not just a normal Google search.
  2. Select Advanced Scholar Search by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the top left corner of the screen, and scrolling down to the "Advanced search option."
  3. In Advanced Scholar Search, enter information about the article. For example, we can search for the title "Basic Local Search Alignment Tool" in the "with all of the words" search field. Then, we can enter "Altschul" as the author in the field "Return Articles authored by."
  4. In the search results there will be a "Cited by" link beneath the article citation that shows the number of sources Google Scholar found citing the article.
  5. Clicking on the "Cited by" link gives a list of articles that have cited the article.

Note: Google Scholar will likely produce more cited references than either Web of Science or Scopus, but some of these may be duplicates. Google does not provide a complete list of all the publications it indexes, so it is difficult to know if Google Scholar provides comprehensive citation counts.

Backward

  1. Navigate to Google Scholar - make sure you are actually in Google Scholar, not just a normal Google search.
  2. Select Advanced Scholar Search by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the top left corner of the screen, and scrolling down to the "Advanced search option."
  3. In Advanced Scholar Search, enter information about the article. For example, we can search for the title "Basic Local Search Alignment Tool" in the "with all of the words" search field. Then, we can enter "Altschul" as the author in the field "Return Articles authored by."
  4. Locate the search result that matches your search terms. You can click on the item title OR the hyperlinks to the right of the record item, "Discover UIUC Full-Text" or "[HTML] oxfordjournals.org" to access the full-text article and find the "References" section towards the bottom of the page/article. Here you will find the articles that were used in the writing of and research for "Basic Local Search Alignment."