Tips for power-searchers
Marisa Conte - meese@umich.edu
Clinical and Translational Science Liaison
Taubman Health Sciences Library
University of Michigan
© Regents of the University of Michigan 2010
Today’s agenda
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Introduction and refresher
Search shortcuts
Operators
Google Scholar
Special searches
Blogs, news and groups
Search URL “hacks”
Questions?
Shortcuts
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Put phrases in “ ”to increase search precision
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Use * as wildcard to replace unknown words
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ssri stands +for
Use – to exclude concepts Google would normally pair
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April is the * month
Use + to include words Google would normally exclude
from search
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“national institutes of health”
bass -music
Use .. for number ranges
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2006..2008 or 2006..
$50..$100 or ..$50
Operators – term location
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Site: search only a specified site or domain
 “adverse
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Inurl: search term must occur in site’s URL
 “clinical
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drug reaction” site:gov
trials” inurl:cancer
Intitle: search term must occur in webpage title
 intitle:support
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Intext: search term must occur on webpage
 intext:voluntary
recall inurl:fda.gov
More operators
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Info: website information, including cache
 Info:www.panexa.com
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Filetype: retrieve only specified filetype
 “Single
nucleotide polymorphism” filetype:ppt
Advanced search menu
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Access to all operators, Boolean logic and shortcuts
Date page was last modified
Usage rights
Language
Combine advanced features in one search
Google Scholar
The good
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Efficient option for knownitem searching
Free!
Familiar interface and
functionality
Stemming algorithm
The maybe-not-so-good
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Sources are not defined
No author disambiguation or
standard publication forms Questionable ranking and
article relevance results
No results sort options
Questionable cited-by
reference counts
Google Scholar operators
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Author:
 Stress
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ulceration author:welage
Intitle: search words in article title
 Intitle:“antirheumatic
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drug therapy”
Date:
 [#]..[#]
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These and other operators and functions, including
publication search, available from Advanced Search
Special Google searches
Dictionary
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Define: word– for
dictionary results
 Define:egalitarian
Or type term and stands
+for to decode acronyms
or abbreviations
Calculator
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Enter the formula into
the search box
Can do complex
functions:
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^ or ** for exponentiation
% of
Nth root of
Unit conversions
http://www.googleguide.c
om/calculator.html
Google News
Operators
intitle:
intext:
inurl:
location:
Google Blogs
Operators:
blogurl:
inblogtitle:
inposttitle:
inpostauthor:
URL “hacks”
Append the following text to the search query URL:
 &num=x changes number of results on main page
 &as_qdr=m3, m6, y sets a daterange limit
 &as_sitesearch=.gov to limit to a site or domain
Thank you!
Marisa Conte
meese@umich.edu