AUTHOR'S ENGLISH WRTING GUIDE

Google Scholar: A Useful Tool for Technical Phrasing

Google Scholar is a vast database of scientific literature provided by Google and is used by many researchers during the literature review process. Beyond identifying key publications and citations, it is an incredibly useful tool to ensure that you are using field-specific terms in a way that is both grammatically correct and broadly understood by others in your field.

By entering a phrase or group of terms into the search bar, Google Scholar retrieves various scientific publications that include those terms. This will give you various examples of how such terms and phrases are used in context in related publications. However, if your search terms are too general, you will be faced with a sea of unrelated results. There are various tricks and tips (such as use of AND, OR, +, or -) that will allow you to make such searches more specific and effective. The University of Otago library provides one such excellent resource:

https://www.otago.ac.nz/library/pdf/Google_Scholar_Tips.pdf

Another handy feature of Google Scholar is that it will make suggestions for the correct term if you have misspelled or incorrectly phrased some terminology in your search. For example, if you enter hypo volemia shock into the search bar, Google will automatically return the results for hypovolemic shock, the correct technical phrasing for that term.

Although there can be multiple grammatically correct ways to phrase something, not all are used by technical experts or will be acceptable to top journals. It is essential that other researchers be able to find your paper using key terms, so ensure that your phrasing of main terminology matches the conventions used in your field. 

The best Google Scholar tool for ensuring precise field-specific terminology is the use of quotation marks.

Using our example above, if I enter “hypervolemia shock” into the Google Scholar search bar, it returns 914 results. This number is listed immediately below the search bar after every search. In contrast, if I enter “hypovolemic shock,” Google Scholar returns 41,700 results. Based on this, we can clearly see which term is more commonly used and accepted. 

In cases where terms might be similar among fields of research, we need to narrow our results to the phrasing used in a specific field or area of research. This is achieved through the use of additional search tools. If we enter “hypervolemia shock” AND cancer, we obtain only 358 results. In contrast, searching for “hypervolemic shock” AND cancer returns over 10,000 results.

If you are concerned that the terminology you are looking for has changed in the past few years, you can select papers published recently using the search options on the left bar menu of the page. Google Scholar will provide you with the number of applicable results for that specific time frame.

Google Scholar is a useful, free, and highly accessible resource that can help you identify the common conventions for technical terminology used in your field.