5.3.4 Advanced journal queries

The General Citation Search can be used for advanced journal queries to find out whether a particular journal has published on a particular topic. In the search for publications on Google Scholar that I described above, we saw that many of the publications on Google Scholar by Peter Jacsó appeared in Online Information Review.

Therefore, I want to try to establish whether the journal has published any further papers about this topic. The screenshot below shows the search I would conduct and the results I would receive. Please note that if we do not want to get all the articles by Peter Jacsó again, we can exclude them by putting “P Jacso” in the “All of the words” field.

It is important to use this exact combination. If instead I would use “Peter Jacso” I would also exclude articles that talk about Peter Jacsó, which they would normally do as Jacsó or Peter Jacsó. If I did not put quotes around P Jacso, it would also match Jacso, P. As most referencing standards prescribe the use Last Name, Initial(s) in the list of references, this would exclude any article that referred to an article by Jacsó in the list of references. As many of the academics writing about Google Scholar include a reference to an article by Jacsó, this would leave us with very few results.

Analogous to advanced author queries, you can use this search strategy whenever you want to know what a particular journal has published about a particular topic. If for instance you want to know what Science has published about HIV, an advanced journal query like the one below will give you the answer in less than a minute.