Jump to Navigation

Google and Google Scholar

Google and Google Scholar for your research

google_small.png

Google search tips
Help and tools
Evaluation
Citation

Google search tips

Choose search terms carefully

  1. Be specific - use words which define the topic narrowly
  2. Use phrase searching by putting double quotation marks around the words
  3. Google automatically stems words e.g. galaxy, galaxies
  4. Google ignores common stop words the, an, for, of, etc.
  5. Word order matters - the words gold mining are not the same as mining gold

Download Power Searching with Google Quick Reference (pdf) for more quick tips.

Operators & Advanced Search

  • Search operators help increase the relevancy of a search. Use the site: operator to search for information within a site or domain e.g. gold mining site:edu.au will find gold mining at educational sites in Australia. Advanced search can be used instead of operators.
  • Site or domain to specify that you only want web pages from:
  • Terms appearing in the whole page or page title - this is a really useful way of limiting results
  • File type to limit by format such as pdf

Advanced search is at the bottom of the search results screen. Examples from the form:

adv_search.png

Help and tools

Google Accounts
  • Personalise your access to Google products and services.
  • Access your Gmail account or set up Google alerts for a search.
Google Basics

Learn how Google discovers, crawls and serves web pages.
Inside search An excellent site with search tips and tricks.
Google Drive Store your Google documents.

Evaluation

Remember to carefully evaluate any information that you find on the web. See the UQ Library "How-to" guide on Internet Resource Evaluation.

Citation

If you use any information that you find on the web, you must reference it in your paper. The UQ Library has a range of guides to referencing according to different style manuals (Harvard, APA, Vancouver, MLA, etc.).

Back to Top