Speaker 1: Google Scholar is a search engine for scholarly articles and outputs. It has conference presentations, it has patents, it has case law, it has peer-reviewed papers, it has everything you need to find out what's going on in a particular field. Now, there are two massive ways, umbrellas if you will, that we can use this. First of all, we're finding that scholarly literature. You can use advanced search, you can use a little trick that I'll show you later on with ChatGPT, and also we have profiles. You can create a public-facing profile, which means that other scientists and other people are able to find out what you're publishing, and you can also look to see what other people are publishing. It's amazing, and if you are doing research, you'll be using this a lot. So here are all of the tips and tricks that you need to know to use it properly. The first thing we need to know about is what is Google Scholar? Well, check it out here. As I've said, it's ability to search all scholarly literature in one place. It has citations, authors, and publications. Now the thing is, is that we need to make sure that we're not just using this like at face value. Not everything in Google Search or Google Scholar is peer-reviewed. If we go to the top here, we can see that we've got a range of different things that can pop up in a search. We have got articles, theses, books, abstracts, core opinions, and more. I've actually also seen magazine articles appear in Google Scholar. So not everything in Google Scholar is peer-reviewed. If you want to know if something is peer-reviewed, you've got to click through to find out where it's come from. We'll be talking about how to get the full access of all of these papers at the end of this video, so make sure you stay around. But in the meantime, here are the things that you need to know about using Scholar effectively. So when you first go to Google Scholar, you'll get this page. Look at it. So simple, so lovely, and all you have to do is type in a search term into this box. Then down here we can say we want articles, we want case law. Most people are going to want just articles for PhD research and other types of research, but if you are a lawyer, you can use it for case law as well. So if we put what we want in here, in my case, I've put organic photovoltaic devices, we can see that then we get all of these searches. We get 918,000 results with the search term organic photovoltaics, and that was my research field. We get this lovely page that pops up. We get all of the papers. These are the authors. This is where it's published. This is the year, and this is the publisher, and you get these for so many different papers from different journals, and here we've got related searches as well. So we can go deeper once we've found that search term that really broadly represents our research field. Then down the side here, this is where it gets interesting. We can do any time since 2024, since 2023. That means that if you're looking for recent literature for a literature search, or you want to go back as far as possible to find the foundational papers in a research field, you can do that. You can also sort different by relevance and then by date. That's really good if you want to start early and go backwards, and then we've got any type of article, review articles only. Review articles are brilliant at the beginning of a literature review because they do part of the literature review for you. They go out. They look at a range of different articles, bring them together in one review article, so that's really good. You can also include patents and include citations, but that is not everything that this does. If we go down here and we go to advanced search, we can see that we can get even more niche with the sort of articles that we're popping up to the surface in Google Scholar. We can have all of the words, exact phrase, one of the words. If you're finding that your search terms just quite aren't hitting the mark, use this advanced search. Also, if there's an author that you like or that there's articles published in a certain journal, you can search it here and then return articles dated between this date and this date. That is how you use advanced search on Google Scholar. It's super powerful and something that not many people make the most use of in their PhD or research. We'll talk about how to open up these articles and where to find them in a minute, but there's something not a lot of people do, and that is click up here and use this button, profiles. If you click on profiles, it will retain the same search term, but now you have all of these scientists that do organic solar cells, organic photovoltaics, or whatever you've put in at the top. I really highly recommend going through and getting comfortable with the big publishers in your research field and follow them on Google Scholar or just whatever you're using to track them. Just do a search for their name, search for their research groups. It's a really great way of finding the most up-to-date stuff by looking at the conference presentations of what their PhD students are doing. It's just so valuable and too many people ignore the fact that this is what you can do. Next thing is, how do you see profiles? This is the profiles from the search, but also you get your profile. If I click up here on my profile, mine isn't public facing anymore, but you can see that there's my name, I don't have a picture, and then we've got all of this information just crammed in. These are all of the papers that I've published that Google Scholar has picked up on. The thing is that Google Scholar sometimes picks up articles from other Andrew Stapletons. There's a guy in Sydney who does game design, I think, for learning and education. This is where we've got to be super careful that if we have our own profile, we can go through and remove them and change them and that sort of stuff. We can also add stuff up here. We can also look at the trash, the ones that we've got rid of. Then over here is what every scientist and every researcher is trying to game forever. Those are your indexes and your citations. You can see 2019 was a great year for me, and then ever since I left science in 2017, it went up for two years, and now it's slowly coming down because I'm just not publishing very much. That's the issue. Then down here, you can see my co-authors, and it goes on and on. Basically, every single scientist should have a Google Scholar page and just keep it up to date. It doesn't take much effort to go through and just clean it up every so often. Also, if you want to follow someone, you click here, follow, and this will set up email alerts and let you know when that person has published. More on alerts now because if we go here into the bar and we say, okay, I want alerts, you can click here, and you end up with a create alert. You can create an alert for anything you want. You can also click this, which is include less relevant results too if you're finding that it's not really choosing the best ones for you. I used to have about five or six of these set up during my PhD so that the papers would just come to me. Once a week, I'd sit down, I'd go through them, and I'd be like, yes, this is important. No, this is not important, et cetera, et cetera. There's something that you need to know about alerts is that once you do a particular search, let's go back to the search term, which is organic photovoltaics, you can click down here and it says create alert. Just by clicking that, then you'll create alert for yourself and it will show you the most relevant results. It will show you, for example, less relevant results, whether or not you want to include things like this. I would want to include that sort of stuff because it's on the border and sort of like the edge of my interest, which can influence my research going forward. Then I create alert and then it will send it to my email address. I love it. So good, so easy, so powerful. Click through, set up at least five for your research field, and just let those papers come to you. Come to me. There's something you need to know about searching for stuff on Google Scholar and that is it all relies on keywords. Keywords are a massive pain in the ass if you can't really think of them. When you've entered a new research field, you don't know what to search for. So one of the things I love to do, and I've talked about this in my previous videos, is go to chat GPT and you can see here that I've essentially said that I need its help and this is how you do it. Chat GPT works really well with context, so I like to give it as much context about my current situation during my research as possible so it really gives you good results. This is what the best prompt is. I'm starting on my literature review and my supervisor hasn't had their morning coffee yet, so I don't want to ask them the best keywords to search for in Google Scholar for a literature review on transparent electrode materials. Can you help me? And it's strange. If you give it weird contexts like that, it actually works a little bit harder than if you just say, give me keywords, I don't know why. So here we go. It says, certainly. Thank you very much, chat GPT, you're so cute. It says core keywords are here and then specific materials, it's got here, it's got properties and applications, it's got them here, synthesis and fabrication techniques. So I can go through these and I can chain them together and even down here you can see that it says use Boolean operators such as AND or NOT to include or combine certain terms and it gives me some examples here. So overall, this is just such a good way of just making sure that you are covering an entire research field and keep a list of these keywords saved somewhere on your computer so that you can always refer back to them and you know the most powerful keywords to be put into something like Google Scholar. Now I want to talk about using Google Scholar to get full articles of the stuff it suggests. So here from the results page, we can see that we've got ScienceDirect on this side, a PDF, a PDF, so if we click on those, we will be expecting full PDFs but sometimes there's nothing and quite often that means we can't get the full file. Well, we can. If you head over to my new favorite place that everyone shouldn't go to which is Anna's Archive, they've got this in beta mode which I absolutely love, it's SciDatabase. You go in and you put the DOI. Where do you get the DOIs? Well, you get them from clicking on through, so if we click through for this one, every single peer-reviewed journal has what they call a Document Object Identifier. You can see it here. So all we do is right click and then we say copy link address and then we can go over to Anna's Archive and we can paste it in and then we say open and then it will go away and it will open up that file if it can find it. This is a site that aggregates... Oh, I have to say if I'm a human, I am a human. Thank you very much. Once you click on that, you will see that it will do its best to go away and find these full papers for you. The legality of this is grey but everyone's doing it, so just make sure you do it sensibly. And here it is, the full paper. You can record it in Anna's Archive. You can download it. There's also doi.org and you can do this for a range and range of different papers. It has never been easier. Sometimes Google Scholar is a little bit boring just to use on its own, using keywords. So you can use Semantic Search and my favorite Google Scholar alternatives are Semantic Scholar. So here is a free AI-powered research tool for scientific literature. Go in here, type in keywords and you will get the results. Another one, and this is where you ask questions. You can have a question come to your mind and type it directly into this search engine without having to turn it into keywords in your mind or using chat GPT. Here we go. You just ask a research question into illicit.com. This is slowly becoming paid but I think it's got reasonable free credits for you to try this out. So you can go in. You can find papers. What is the best sex position? So if there's something you want to know about in your life, you type it in and you can see that it gets the question and it goes through and looks for the most relevant answers to that research question. So here we are. Research on the best sex position is varied and context specific. Oh, no easy answer then. And then you can see on the top here, we've got all of the best four papers that it reckons that I should read. And what's this? Back pain patients prefer the male superior position but experience difficulties in sexual functioning due to pain. That sounds annoying. But this is where you get all of the stuff. You get the paper. You get the DOI and yeah, a great alternative to Google Scholar. I use illicit nearly every day for like questions that just pop into my mind. Semantic Scholar if I want to look more detailed at keywords and yeah, this is ChatGPT with Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar and illicit. I don't think it gets any better than that for finding research out there. I just wish these were around when I was doing my research in my PhD. It would have been so much easier. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about finding every bit of literature you need using AI tools. Go check it out because it's an important one to watch after this one.