Finding that illusive academic through a journal/keywords search

Shows you how to use the Publish or Perish software to find a specific academic if you only recall where they are working and a journal they have published in

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Tue 25 Nov 2025 15:56)

A Publish or Perish Keywords search can be used to find specific academics. Does this scenario sound familiar? You have attended your field’s major academic conference and had a good conversation about the purpose of academia with someone you really want to follow up with. However, you did not get their business card and forgot their name.

The only two things that you can remember is that they were working at the University of Melbourne and had published an article on your conversation topic in the Academy of Management of Learning & Education. You could go to the University of Melbourne website and review their staff list, but that might be a tedious process. You could also go through the full table of contents of the Academy of Management Learning & Education over the years hoping you would remember their name if you saw it.

However, what would be a much simpler option is to conduct the search above, entering the journal in the Publication name field and the University in the Keywords field. This would allow you to refresh your memory in seconds and realise that you had been talking to me about the article below :-). This search strategy will not always lead to such a quick result, but it is worth a try.

Some caveats

First, note that you will need to put quotes around the university name to get an exact match. Otherwise Google Scholar will match the search with any papers in AMLE that have university in their full text (i.e. every article) and refer in some way to Melbourne (a lot fewer, but more than twenty). If you do not include quotes, the search will result in fifty articles.

Second, please note that this search is not flawless. Google Scholar does not have an “affiliation” field as such. Hence you need to use the Keywords field and the name of the university will be matched anywhere in the document. The results of our search contain twenty articles. Of these only eleven match our intention of finding an author affiliated by the University of Melbourne: two by me, four by Tine Köhler, three by Bill Harley, and one each by Ray Zammuto and Rita Chugh.

The nine other articles refer to the University of Melbourne somewhere in their paper, as location of another university in Melbourne (Melbourne Business School, Monash University), as the location of their empirical research, as the PhD institution of one of the authors, or even in the acknowledgments or references.

Note: this example was created when I was working at the University of Melbourne, I moved to Middlesex University in 2014 and retired in 2024 (see: Why did I take early retirement & farewell messages), but the example still works as the paper has the University of Melbourne affiliation.

Earlier projects in this series

Publish or Perish is a Swiss army knife!

These are just a few of the hundreds of nuggets of quality information that you can find using the free Publish or Perish software. Are you interested in finding out more about how you can use the software to conduct effective author, journal, topic, and affiliation searches?

Do you want to learn how to use it for tenure or promotion applications, conducting literature reviews and meta-analyses, deciding where to submit your paper, preparing for job interviews, writing laudations or obituaries, finding reviewers or keynote speakers, uncovering “citation connections” between scholars, and doing bibliometric research?

To read about all of this and much much more, buy my brand-new guide in my Crafting your career in academia series: Using the Publish or Perish software. At 375 pages it is chock-full of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the software. I promise you will discover at least a dozen use cases that you had never even thought about before!

Other books in the series

My book series Crafting your career in academia launched in August 2022 with a book on Writing Effective Promotion Applications. The series is a collection of short guides dealing with various aspects of working in academia. It is based on my popular blog.

Aug 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Nov 2022:

Only £5.95...		 Feb 2023:

Only £5.95...		 May 2023:

Only £5.95...

Copyright © 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Tue 25 Nov 2025 15:56

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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