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 best option by many when undertaking searches for academic sources (Coppin, 2013; Raheel et al., 2018). 

Along with the popularity of Google Scholar, a range of online advice is available which helps users improve the searches they undertake. These include the use of operators such as those listed by Alfonso (2016) and the use of items in the menu on the left of the page such as ‘Advance search’ and Settings (See fig.1). 





Figure 1 Google Scholar showing the menu on the left 



Two of the operators available to aid searches in Google Scholar are the inverted commas (“…”) and the wildcard (*). In the case of the inverted commas, it means that the exact phrase inside the inverted commas becomes the search rather than each separate word. Therefore, when searching for “oral communication apprehension” the number of results was 3,040 but without the inverted commas the number of results was 120,000 since the three words can appear anywhere in the text and not necessarily next to each other.


In the case of the wildcard, this can be used inside the inverted commas where alternative words could appear. So, for example, searching for information about the nerves experienced by presenters, a search for “presenters are nervous” produced 13 results. Replacing ‘are’ with a wildcard (“presenters * nervous”) means the results rose to 46 with ‘get’ and ‘become’ appearing a number of times as results. 


In most advice given about the use of inverted commas and wildcards this is as far as it goes. Using multiple wildcards in searches on Google Scholar is a practice that seems largely ignored, despite it helping those searching to find a manageable number of relevant results quickly. In fact, the only reference to the use of multiple wildcards found in a recent Google search was a post on the blog ResearchBuzz from 2017 called Google Scholar and the Full-Word Wildcard. So, going back to the previous example of “presenters * nervous”, by adding a second wildcard (“presenters * * nervous”) there are 50 new results with the two wildcards becoming a wide range of pairs of words with ‘is however’, ‘who get’, ‘could be’ the first three results. A third wildcard gives 22 results with ‘based on how’ and ‘seem to be’ among the results while adding further wildcards produces similar quantities of results. These results are rather numerous to be useful. In such a case it is worth thinking of an extra word to include inside the inverted commas. So, for example, by adding ‘many’ before presenters, one wild card produces five results, for two and four wildcards there are two results each, for three and five there are no results, while for six wildcards there was one result: ‘presenters feel compelled to apologize for being nervous’. This is a much more manageable number of results to work with. 


Should the search need to continue then the next procedure would be to reverse the terms between the inverted commas and work backwards. So, in this case we find just one result which is produced with four wildcards: ‘PowerPoint is liked by nervous speakers. Research shows that many presenters think: ‘If I stop talking, at least something is happening on the screen.’ (Lane, 2009). There were no results for any other searches from one to six wildcards. 


This short video provides further information about completing searches using multiple wildcards in Google Scholar. 



REFERENCES


Alfonzo, P. (2016). Teaching Google Scholar: A practical guide for librarians Vol. 26. Rowman & Littlefield.

Coppin, A. (2013). Finding science and engineering specific data set usage or funding acknowledgements. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 73. http://www.istl.org/13-summer/article1.html?a_aid=3598aabf

Gray, J. E., Hamilton, M. C., Hauser, A., Janz, M. M., Peters, J. P., & Taggart, F. (2012). Scholarish: Google Scholar and its value to the sciences. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, No. 70. https://doi.org/10.5062/F4MK69T9 

Gusenbauer, M. (2019). Google Scholar to overshadow them all? Comparing the sizes of 12 academic search engines and bibliographic databases. Scientometrics, 118(1), 177-214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2958-5 

Harzing, A. W. (2020). Everything you always wanted to know about research impact. In Clark, T., Ketchen Jr., D.J., & Wright, M. (Eds.) How to Get Published in the Best Management Journals. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Ireland, C. & Byrne, G. (2022 June 23). Study Hacks Part 2: Online Search Strategies. YouTube Channel: Academic Communication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ROYlUHBfGY

Lane, D. (2009) A young OR guide to giving bad presentations: N-rules for assuring failure. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Lane-24/publication/44843559 

Le, T. G. T., & Nguyen, T. L. (2022). Factors Affecting Perceived Usefulness of Google Scholar by University Students: An Empirical Study from Vietnam. The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business, Vol. 9 No.5, pp. 431-441. https://doi.org/10.13106/jafeb.2022.vol9.no5.0431 

Loan, F.A. & Sheikh, S. (2018), “Is Google scholar really scholarly?”,  Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 7-9.  https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-11-2017-0078 

Octavianus, H., & Fachrudin, K. A. (2022). Income Diversification on Stability in Banking Industry A Systematic Literature Review. International Journal of Environmental, Sustainability, and Social Science, 3(2), 276-287. https://journalkeberlanjutan.keberlanjutanstrategis.com/index.php/ijesss/article/download/212/226

Raheel, M., Ayaz, S., & Afzal, M. T. (2018). Evaluation of h-index, its variants and extensions based on publication age & citation intensity in civil engineering. Scientometrics, 114 (3), 1107-1127.

ResearchBuzz2 (2017 April 18). Google Scholar and the Full-Word Wildcard. ResearchBuzz. https://researchbuzz.me/2017/04/18/google-scholar-and-the-full-word-wildcard/



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