Marisa Conte - Clinical and Translational Science Liaison Taubman Health Sciences Library University of Michigan Tips for power-searchers © Regents of the University of Michigan 2010

Today’s agenda  Introduction and refresher  Search shortcuts  Operators  Google Scholar  Special searches  Blogs, news and groups  Search URL “hacks”  Questions?

Shortcuts  Put phrases in “ ”to increase search precision  “national institutes of health”  Use * as wildcard to replace unknown words  April is the * month  Use + to include words Google would normally exclude from search  ssri stands +for  Use – to exclude concepts Google would normally pair  bass -music  Use.. for number ranges  or  $50..$100 or..$50

Operators – term location  Site: search only a specified site or domain  “adverse drug reaction” site:gov  Inurl: search term must occur in site’s URL  “clinical trials” inurl:cancer  Intitle: search term must occur in webpage title  intitle:support  Intext: search term must occur on webpage  intext:voluntary recall inurl:fda.gov

More operators  Info: website information, including cache  Info:  Filetype: retrieve only specified filetype  “Single nucleotide polymorphism” filetype:ppt

Advanced search menu  Access to all operators, Boolean logic and shortcuts  Date page was last modified  Usage rights  Language  Combine advanced features in one search

Google Scholar  Efficient option for known- item searching  Free!  Familiar interface and functionality  Stemming algorithm  Sources are not defined  No author disambiguation or standard publication forms -  Questionable ranking and article relevance results  No results sort options  Questionable cited-by reference counts The goodThe maybe-not-so-good

Google Scholar operators  Author:  Stress ulceration author:welage  Intitle: search words in article title  Intitle:“antirheumatic drug therapy”  Date:  [#]..[#]  These and other operators and functions, including publication search, available from Advanced Search

Special Google searches  Define: word– for dictionary results  Define:egalitarian  Or type term and stands +for to decode acronyms or abbreviations  Enter the formula into the search box  Can do complex functions:  ^ or ** for exponentiation  % of  Nth root of  Unit conversions  om/calculator.html om/calculator.html DictionaryCalculator

Google News Operators intitle: intext: inurl: location:

Google Blogs Operators: blogurl: inblogtitle: inposttitle: inpostauthor:

URL “hacks” Append the following text to the search query URL:  &num=x changes number of results on main page  &as_qdr=m3, m6, y sets a daterange limit  &as_sitesearch=.gov to limit to a site or domain

Marisa Conte Thank you!