Do you Google? If so, you might know that characters like quotation marks, asterisks, and other operators can customize, even refine, your search. Google Guide offers a wealth of such tips and tricks for searching Google, including a cheat sheet.
Although this guide is explicitly written for regular Google, and interestingly enough, not by Google, a quick application of the tips listed in the Crafting Your Query Using Special Characters section shows that the functions also work in Google Scholar, which searches over a broad range of scholarly literature.
One feature that was news to me was using the tilde (~) to prompt Google, and Google Scholar, to look for search term synonyms. Click here for more information about using the tilde operator.
If you’re off-campus, you can customize Google Scholar to link to library resources via the Find It tool (on campus Google Scholar will already do this by recognizing the Hopkins IP address). Just remember to use the VPN software in order to access those resources.
Questions about using Google Scholar in conjunction with the library’s resources, or need help searching? Be sure contact your local librarian.
Google is not a verb. It is a noun.
Dear Antiverb,
While originally the word Google represented only the search engine company’s name, its use as a verb has long been accepted. Check out Webster’s entry for Google, which dates the use of Google as a transitive verb to 2001. The OED dates Google’s use as a verb back to 1999.
Grammatically Yours,
Beth