PBHL-S349 Research Methods in Community Health

When searching Google Scholar, you don't need to:

• Add 'AND' between words
• Include plurals or slight variations of words. Google Scholar will search for variations of a word (tax, taxes, taxation).

Things you should do:

• Use 'OR' between synonyms such as tobacco OR cigarettes
• Use the code intitle:word to retrieve articles with that word in the title. Very useful for narrowing a search!
• Add quotes around any word or phrase ("tobacco tax") to ensure that word is in the results. Sometimes Google's algorithm will skip a keyword.

This video tutorial will show you how to used advanced Google searching techniques to locate grey literature, such as government reports from other countries. 

Google Advanced gives you more control over your search, and can be very helpful in finding grey literature and government documents.

Try these fields:

Region: search for results from a particular country's domain

Domain: search only .gov or .edu

Format: search for PDF only

Experiment with the keyword fields

Just Google it! 

Note: not all countries have their own Google site.

Once you know the country's domain, you can limit to that country's government websites using "site:.gov.COUNTRYDOMAIN." 

Example for Nigeria: