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You can increase the accuracy and effectiveness of your searches on Google Scholar by adding "operators" that fine-tune your search terms. In some cases, you can add operators right in the Google Scholar search box; other times, you'll want to use the Advanced Scholar Search page.

Here are the most common Google Scholar operators:

Author Search - Publication Restrict - Date Restrict - Other Operators

Author search is one of the most effective ways to find a specific paper. If you know who wrote the paper you're looking for, you can simply add their last name to your search terms.

For example:
The search [friedman regression] returns papers on the subject of regression written by people named Friedman. If you want to search on an author's full name, or last name and initials, enter the name in quotes: ["jh friedman"].

When a word is both a person's name and a common noun, you might want to use the "author:" operator. This operator only affects the search term that immediately follows it, and there must be no space between "author:" and your search term.

For example:
[author:flowers] returns papers written by people with the name Flowers, whereas [flowers -author:flowers] returns papers about flowers, and ignores papers written by people with the name Flowers (a minus in front of a search term excludes results that contain this search term).

You may use the operator with an author's full name in quotes to further refine your search. Try to use initials rather than full first names, because some sources indexed in Google Scholar only provide the initials.

For example:
To find papers by Donald E. Knuth, you could try [author:"d knuth"], [author:"de knuth"], or [author:"donald e knuth"].

A publication-restricted search only returns results with specific words from a specific publication.

For example:
If you want to search the Journal of Finance for articles about mutual funds, you might start like this:

Keep in mind, however, that publication-restricted searches may be incomplete. Google Scholar gathers bibliographical data from many sources, including automatically extracting it from text and citations. This information may be incomplete or even incorrect; many preprints, for instance, don't say where (or even whether) the article was ultimately published.

In general, publication-restricted searches are effective if you're certain of what you're looking for, but they‘re often narrower than you might expect.

For instance:
You might find that a search across all publications for [mutual funds] gives more useful results than a more specific search for "funds" only in the Journal of Finance.

Finally, bear in mind that one journal can be spelled several ways (e.g., Journal of Biological Chemistry is often abbreviated as J Biol Chem), so you may need to try several spellings of a given publication in order to get complete search results.

(This option is only available on the Advanced Scholar Search page.)

Date-restricted searches can be effective when you're looking for the latest developments in a given area.

For example:
Here's how you'd search for articles on superconducting films that were published since 2004:

Bear in mind, however, that some web sources don't include publication dates, and a date-restricted search will not return articles for which Google Scholar was unable to determine a date of publication. So if you're sure that an article about superconducting films came out this year and a date-restricted search doesn't find it, retry the search without the date restriction.

Other Operators

Google Scholar also supports most of the advanced operators in Google web search:

• the "+" operator makes sure your results include common words, letters or numbers that Google's search technology generally ignores, as in [+de knuth];
• the "-" operator excludes all results that include this search term, as in [flowers -author:flowers];
• phrase search only returns results that include this exact phrase, as in ["as you like it"];
• the "OR" operator returns results that include either of your search terms, as in [stock call OR put];
• the "intitle:" operator as in [intitle:mars] only returns results that include your search term in the document's title.