We can run an advanced search in Google Scholar by directly typing a combination of keywords and search operators into the search bar. Below is an explanation of the main operators you might want to use in your own searches.
| Keyword/Search operator | Intended outcome |
| “diet therapy” | Use "double quotation marks" to retrieve documents that contain an exact phrase |
| bulimia OR anorexia | Use the OR operator to retrieve documents that contain either search term or all search terms |
| stress anxiety depression | Use multiple search terms together to retrieve documents that contain all the search terms |
| Dementia -Alzheimer’s | Use a hyphen - before a search term to retrieve documents that exclude that search term |
| allintitle: “mental health” | Use the allintitle: operator to retrieve documents that include that search term or exact phrase in the title of the document |
| "diet therapy" bulimia OR anorexia site:ac.uk | Adding the site: operator at the end of your search will limit your search to particular websites i.e. site:ac.uk, site:edu, site:nhs.uk, site:gov.uk or site:org.uk |
| Dementia -Alzheimer’s filetype:pdf | Use the filetype: operator at the end of your search to specify the type of file you want to retrieve i.e. filetype:pdf, filetype:doc or filetype:ppt |
The limit options on the left-hand side of your search results will allow you to further refine your results by date range. When you have entered a date range, click on 'Search'.
Another way to run an advanced search in Google Scholar is to use the Advanced search pop-up window. This allows you to search for specific authors, publications and apply a publication date range, as well as restricting your search to specific keywords, exact phrases and the exclusion of particular words.
To run this advanced search in Google Scholar, click on the three horizontal lines in the top left-hand corner of the page and choose ‘Advanced search’.
A pop-up window appears with predefined options for describing the scope of your search.
This is an example of using the advanced search pop-up window to identify white papers on AI. This particular search will only retrieve documents where AI and white paper both appear in the title as the option, ‘in the title of the article’ has been selected. This will return a more focused set of results, but we could also add a date range if we wanted to focus our results further.
