Speaker 1: Best Google Scholar search strategies start over on Google Scholar. If you are new to a certain field, head over there, and this is what I would do. I would start playing around with the auto-suggest. For example, I can go in and I can go solar, and then I go, okay, well I know I want to know about solar cells, let's have a look to see what sort of language they use. Solar cells, solar energy, solar panels, that's great. I'm going to type in solar cell, and then I'm going to start to see what kind of suggestions it gives me. This is going to tell me the best keywords that I can use in Google Scholar. You see, nowadays, with all this AI fancy stuff that's going on, we're quite often using semantic search like questions, ideas to search, but it is the OG of searching literature, so you have to use keywords. This is a way you can find out all of those. You go through, and one thing I like to do is use the alphabet methods where I say, okay, solar cell A, applications and methods, array, and I start taking note and saving these in an Excel document as to all of the things that I could potentially want to know about in the future. After I've done A, I use B. I go B like this, battery, band gap, I don't know what a band gap is, so I'll put that into my Excel document or wherever I'm keeping these ideas. Then I'll go C, and then I'll go characteristics, capacitance, simulator, characterization, that's something I need to know about. This is how I would go through. I would go through the entire alphabet using this system and start trying to get the language that is used in my field so that I can search around those terms. If you're a little bit lazy, you can head over to something like Wikipedia where you can get the terms from the Wikipedia page of that area that you're searching. Obviously I want to know about photovoltaic cells, so let's have a look. I'll use photovoltaic. I'll head over here, put in photovoltaic, and then I'll use that, look, I'll use that same thing, photovoltaic, so that's interesting, but I'm going to go A, applications, array, absorbers, apparatus, you get the idea. This is how you start getting an idea of the appropriate search terms that you need to use for a particular field. You can also just head over to ChatGPT and say, hey, give me a list of keywords in the field of whatever. Let's do that right now, ChatGPT, here we go. Give me a list of keywords in the solar cell field for Google Scholar. Now what this will do is kick out a load of keywords that I could potentially use to search. Here we are, photovoltaic, solar energy conversion, thin film, all of these are really, really good. This is a really nice way of starting that broad search, but once you're in Google Scholar with some results, there's so much more that you can do. Not many people use these techniques. The problem is too many people say, oh, Google Scholar, I can't really use it, but the problem is they don't know how to use it properly. Here we go. I'm going to go and I'm just going to put a little bit of a search in. Let's have a look at perovskite solar cells. This is something I know a little bit about but not enough about, so I'm going to go, let's go review. I'm starting nice and broad. With the review article, quite often there are many different studies that are put together into one document. That's a really, really great place to start. I like to look at here, any time since 2024, that will tell me about the recent advances in a field. I really use this side a lot. I use this and I also don't necessarily sort by relevance or date. Sometimes I do if I want to know the newest stuff. Let's say any time, sort by date. Here we are. This is all of the stuff, the newest stuff sorted by how relevant and recent they are. Fantastic. This is where I would start. Now, the thing is, is that when people start trying to understand the results, they often get overwhelmed. Here is how I would use it. First of all, I'm looking at the title of the paper. Great. Obviously, that's where we're starting. If certain names keep on popping up in a field, so here, NG Park, that's interesting to me. If they are underlined, you can actually click on them and get their own Google Scholar search page. Then, all of this is now going to be very interesting to me because he's obviously a researcher in my field. Remember to follow certain researchers. Remember here, you can say follow here. You can set up an email every time this guy produces a paper. This is really, really important that you can click and follow authors. That's the first thing that I would do. Another thing is if you are not getting the sort of results you like, you need to start looking at the Boolean operators. They are completely underutilized. Boolean operators on Google Scholar are AND, NOT, or OR. It's really, really easy. Look. Let me show you over here. If I've got a certain search, this is search term one. Let's say I'm looking for solar cells, I'm just going to put SC. The problem is it's so broad, but I want perovskites. I want that overlap. If I put an AND and it has to be in capital letters, or I put CAND, try to show you capital, that doesn't work at all. Let's get rid of that. See, it has to be in capital letters because otherwise it doesn't recognize it, but we're only going to get this slither. If you're getting stuff that isn't super broad, you need to identify why and then remove that there. That's the first step. Then, if you're getting stuff that is a little bit too broad, but there's some sort of fringe elements or Google Scholar is a little bit confused because the keyword is shared by a few fields, you can use NOT. What that does is give you this big cell here, but not the other search. Search one and then this other phrase. We want to get that out of our search. That's NOT. Then, the last thing, if our searches are too specific and not really useful, then I start using OR because then you get two unrelated potentially fields that you get this one and you get this one all combined together into one search. That is the three Boolean operators you should be using because these are so, so very important because not enough people persevere through the learning curve, which is Google Scholar. You can also do this in other ways. Once you've found your subject area and you're exploring, there are many ways that this can go. These are the most important ones. Right down here is Cited By. If you click Cited By, what this will do is give you another page, which is more up-to-date papers that have cited, that have referenced that particular study. Then, I like to go Sort By Date and that will give me all of the best, most recent citations for this article. Then, you can see I can put Search Within Citing Articles and then I can put another search in. Within these, maybe I want quantum dots. Then, you can see within these citing articles, that is what we got. Then, Articles Within the Last Year, Sorted By Abstracts or Everything. This is a really important way of going out and just sucking in like a basking shark swimming through the ocean open of science and research. Just getting all of the most important stuff and filtering out with your gills, with your science gills, all of the important information. Let's go back to our original search. One thing you'll notice is these quotation marks. It automatically did this. It put it in quotation marks. If you are having too broad of a search and you want to really hone in on something you are interested in and it's given too broad, you can put it in quotation marks. Here, obviously, it knows we want perovskite solar cell and then review. If I wanted something else, I could also use our Boolean operations. I could say that and, I don't know, perovskite solar cells and up, what's it called? Conversion. Yes. Up conversion. Okay. Maybe, oh, here we are. Up conversion. This is how we start getting deeper and more niche into our subject area. That's really, really important. Then, we've got other things down here. Let's go back. We've got Related Articles. I use this a lot when I was doing my PhD and my postdocs because these are the related articles that it thinks I would want to read. Make sure you understand the buttons down the bottom, what they do. Then, see some of these. You can access this with PDF. You can access this on HTML. Some of them don't have anything next to them, which means that it may be a little bit awkward to find the full text. If you click on all five versions, sometimes you're lucky and you end up with a link to other stuff that may be useful to access the full paper. This isn't going to be friendly to me today, is it? No, but sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Another thing down here, Related Searches, this is where you can really get an idea of a research field based on the related searches. Google wants you to find more information about what you're searching for. You can see we can click on all of these. One thing I like to do is click on this and then open in background tab, open this one, open in background tab. Then, I just work my way through the tabs looking at cited by, looking for researchers and just really building up that kind of knowledge base that I should read from. That is how I essentially sort out the roses from the thorns. Is that the right saying? I don't think it is, but it doesn't matter. Another really, really unutilized part of Google Scholar is this bit, Advanced Search. Click on this and you see this is automatically populated by my search, but I want all of the words with review in it. I want the exact phrase, so that's the equivalent of putting it in quotation marks, with at least one of the words, so that's the or, or, or, without the words, so that's the minus or the not these ones, where my words occur, anywhere in the article or in the title. That's really powerful if you really want to hone in on titles. That's really important because a lot of researchers put a lot of effort into their titles to make sure they're searchable. It really sort of just makes sure that you're really finding the most important stuff for your research, authored by, published in, and I use this a lot, articles dated between this and this. That's particularly important in fast moving fields because you want the most up-to-date stuff. In solar cell technology, I really don't want anything from like 2015, oh, no, these are 2015 too, whatever. That is how I sort of like search more in depth and not enough people actually click over on this little sandwich bar up here, or burger bar I think it's called, and head down to advanced search. That is how you sort of like find deeper and deeper understanding, I guess, in your field. If you like this video, now you need to go check out this one where I talk about how to use Google Scholar using cutting edge AI techniques. I'm sure you'll love it. Go check it out. All right. Good. I think that was everything I wanted to get across. Thanks. See you in the next one.