Google Scholar and Multiple Wildcard Searches
This post by Chris Ireland is about conducting Searches in Google Scholar and making use of multiple wildcards to quickly identify useful sources. Despite its title, ‘Google Scholar’ is often viewed with scepticism, with its usefulness as an academic research tool being one issue often raised (Le & Nguyen, 2022) and its efficiency in finding suitable sources another (Loan & Sheikh, 2018) . Indeed, concern over the quality of the results it produces have often been highlighted with its comprehensive system of indexing, which relies entirely on automated processes and therefore allows some non-scholarly sources through ( Harzing , 2020), compared to more selective databases which, unlike Google Scholar, often maintain some human intervention (Gray et al., 2012). However, despite these criticisms Google Scholar is widely reported as being the largest academic search engine or database ( Gusenbauer , 2019; Octavianus & Fachrudin , 2022) and considered as the bes t opti