5.3.1 Finding a specific paper

The General Citation Search can be used to find specific papers. Does this scenario sound familiar? Someone mentioned a recent journal article to you that you should really read, but you forgot both the author and the journal the paper was published in. All you remember is a couple of words in the title: Google Scholar and h-index. Of course you could search for the article in Google, but this is likely to provide you with many false hits.

Using Google Scholar through Publish or Perish can within seconds provide you with a list of likely candidates. The screenshot above shows the search in question. As we can immediately see there are only a couple of publications in the list, all recent. Although it was the most-cited article by Bar-Ilan you were interested in, you now also have a list of related articles that might of interest to you.

This strategy can work even if you remember only one word in the title, provided that it is not a very common word. For instance someone mentions a paper to you about serendipity. You are not sure of any other words in the title and searching for the word anywhere in the document will leave you with too many results.

However, as your counterpart was an academic working in the field of Business, you are fairly certain that the paper you are looking was published in a journal in that area. Hence you search for serendipity in the subject area of Business, Administration, Finance & Economics. After removing duplicates, this leaves you with less than 100 results (see below), hence it would not take a long time to review them.