General search

Publish or Perish tutorial

Anne-Wil Harzing - Sat 6 Feb 2016 16:10 (updated Thu 2 Jun 2022 10:43)

Note: This tutorial was originally written for Publish or Perish version 4 and all screenshots come from this version. However, the information as such is also applicable for later versions of Publish or Perish.

The Publish or Perish General citation search page allows you to perform an Advanced Scholar Search query and analyse its results. This page contains a query pane with all parameters accepted by Google Scholar.

When to use the General citation search?

In many cases you will find that the Author Impact Search or the Journal Impact Search provides you with all the information you need.

However, there are some situations in which a General citation search might be helpful. The General citation search can be used for instance to:

• Find particular articles
• Find particular academics
• Conduct advanced author queries
• Conduct advanced journal queries
• Conduct an institutional search
• Conduct a literature review

Fields in the General citation search

The General citation search pane contains the following fields in Google Scholar. Please note: Microsoft Academic has a more limited set of fields and will apply any search to the title and abstract only.

Author(s)

Enter the names of the authors you want to look up. The recommended format is to use one or more initials and to quote each name, for example "A Harzing". Try to use the initials that the author usually publishes under. You can enter more than one name; this behaves as an AND clause (only co-authored paper), for example "A Harzing" "NG Noorderhaven". To perform an OR query (individual papers AND co-authored ones), include OR in the query: "A Harzing" OR "NG Noorderhaven"

Publication

Enter the name of the publication you want to look up. The recommended format is the full title enclosed in quotes, for example "Journal of International Business". However, you might have to experiment with common abbreviations as well.

Journal ISSN

If you are searching for a particular journal adding the ISSN will often get you a more accurate result.

All of the words

Enter any words that must all appear in the returned papers. This can be used to narrow down the search for a specific set of papers. If you use quotes around the words, this provides you with the same results as using The phrase field. If you include the search terms without quotes, it will provide many more matches as it matches the words in any order. Therefore, if the words are very generic there will be lots of publications that include them.

Any of the words

Enter any words that must appear alone or in combination in the returned papers. This can be used to narrow down the search for a specific set of papers. Unless the terms are very specific, it is usually not very effective to use this field without completing any of the other fields as you might get a lot of irrelevant results.

None of the words

Enter any words that must not appear in the returned papers. This can be used to narrow down the search for a specific set of papers.

The phrase

Enter a phrase (i.e., a specific sequence of words) that must all appear in the returned papers. This can be used to narrow down the search for a specific set of papers.

Year of publication between ... and ...

Enter the range of years in which the papers must have been published.

Title words only

Check this box to restrict the additional word matches (i.e., All of the words, Any of the words, None of the words, The phrase) to the titles of the returned papers; clear the box to match them anywhere in the papers.

Support Publish or Perish

The development of the Publish or Perish software is a volunteering effort that has been ongoing since 2006. Download and use of Publish or Perish is and will remain free (gratis), but your support toward the costs of hosting, bandwidth, and software development are appreciated. Your support helps further development of Publish or Perish for new data sources and additional features.