Google® Scholar Experiment: Refinery vs. "refinery"

Searching Google® Scholar (https://scholar.google.com) is easy, and you usually get great results.

Today’s tip will help you get even better results.

TIP: Refinery vs. “refinery” … this tip can save you browsing time

For example, as an experiment, I performed the following three searches. Each search yielded good results. But by modifying the search statement, I had fewer results to browse through.

GOOGLE® SCHOLAR SEARCH STATEMENTS
Refinery Autonomous Vehicles
24,000 results

Refinery "Autonomous Vehicles"
3260 results

"Refinery" "Autonomous Vehicles"
224 results

The big difference resulted from putting quotes around the word refinery. This eliminates Google’s practice of helping out by searching for terms that are close to your original terms, but not exactly the same.

In my case, Google “helped” me by searching refinery OR refined OR refining. Since I did not want this “help,” I saved browsing time by putting refinery in quotes.

Try this technique on your own searches.

Ten for 10 … The 10 most popular posts since the Desulf Blog began 10 years ago

Unbelievable … in March, 2019, the Desulfurization Blog will be 10 years old. In celebration of that fact, here is a list of the top 10 posts since March, 2009.

Caveat … the Web is an ever changing organism. While I have done my best to review the links in the following posts, some of them may be obsolete.

Post Title	Post Date
Murray Gray, Specializing in Canada Oil Sands Research	May 1, 2009
UPDATE: Since the publication of this post, Dr. Gray, who was the scientific director for the Institute for Oil Sands Innovation until summer of 2014, retired from the University of Alberta and became Professor Emeritus. He is not accepting any new graduate students or post-doctoral fellows. Source https://www.ualberta.ca/chemical-materials-engineering/faculty-and-staff-new/professors-emeriti/murray-gray
Google Scholar: Desulfurization at Saudi Aramco	January 1, 2011
Here is something you can do to improve your online research results … Let’s say you’re interested in recent published results of Saudi Aramco’s desulfurization activities. But you’re interested in substance, not news. Try the TIPS offered in this post.
Revisiting a LinkedIn Discussion	October 27, 2010
Not all LinkedIn groups are created equal. Some are little more than infomercials. Others are a mix. The Oil Refining Global Technology Forum is a mix. UPDATE: A recent search on the Oil Refining Global Technology Forum resulted in the following message: ***THIS PAGE IS NO LONGER UP TO DATE: Please join our other group 'Oil Refining: World Refining Association'​ ***
ChevronTexaco, Vacuum Resid Slurry Hydrocracking (VRSH)	November 13, 2009
A few posts ago I highlighted Sulphco’s efforts to commercialize its Sonocracking™ desulfurization technology. As noted in the Wikinvest article on Sulphco, “Major companies like Merichem, ChevronTexaco (CVX) , CONOCOPHILLIPS (COP) and other large oil producers have been actively pursuing their own versions of sonocracking.” However, even companies with such vast resources at their disposal can have setbacks. TIP: For current information on similar processes, Google® the phrase vacuum residue slurry hydrocracking
Why search more than one journal database: ACS v. ScienceDirect	March 29, 2010
Why search more than one journal database? Simple answer … because they cover different journals.
You’re an expert in something … let the rest of us know	June 8, 2010
Consider showing your expertise by following and participating in a LinkedIn® group. I do. I am not an expert in the technologies used in refining heavy oil. But I am an expert in searching for information on these technologies. So when I found the following post to the Heavy Oil group, I responded with a helpful comment
Case Study: Stay Alert … With Alerts	April 22, 2011
Online database vendors like EbscoHost, LexisNexis, and ScienceDirect work hard to make it easy for you to access their data.  Librarians and other information professionals work hard to make your people aware of the resources and how to use them.
iGoogle Tool: Arabic Keyboard	March 1, 2010
Foreign languages have fascinated me since I was a kid. So every once in a while, I use the Arabic Keyboard, an iGoogle tool, to type in words I have found as I search the Internet for useful desulfurization items. Of course, I can’t read the resulting pages, and the Google® translation is sometimes bizarre. But if you are fluent in the language, you might try it out. UPDATE: iGoogle was discontinued November 2013. TIP: To find an Arabic keyboard, visit: http://www.arabic-keyboard.org/
More Free Stuff ... 16 Desulfurization Articles	June 26, 2011
It is nearly impossible to find quality technical articles for free these days … nearly, but not entirely.  Here are 16 items I found recently.  Browse through and pick out the ones you like. NOTE: The Web changes over time. Some of the links in this post may no longer work. TIP: Try Googling an article title. It may lead you to the current location of the free full text.
Ionic Liquids Update	September 14, 2011
Today’s tip … if you don’t have time to browse the Web, consider hiring someone else to do so.  Jean Steinhardt Consulting specializes in blogs customized for your particular organization.  Pick a topic, and we will design a blog to follow that topic … and to provide tips and tricks to your colleagues on how to improve their research results, no matter what the technology

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Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

Follow Jean’s blog at: http://desulf.blogspot.com/  for continuing tips on effective online research
Email Jean at research@jeansteinhardtconsulting.com  with questions on research, training, or anything else
Visit Jean’s Web site at http://www.jeansteinhardtconsulting.com/  to see examples of the services we can provide

Google® Tip: Weeding gmail

Have you ever deleted several hundred emails from your gmail account and wished you hadn’t?

I have. (this tag line is comedian Tom Papa’s trademark … thanks, Tom.)

Seriously, I accumulated several hundred Google® Scholar alerts over the past couple of years, all of which I kept “just in case.”

Finally deciding to do some end of year house cleaning, I began searching my gmail account for all my Google® Scholar alerts so I could delete them. To my dismay, a simple search for google scholar alerts netted a number of emails that were not Google® Scholar alerts, and which I wanted to keep.

I really did not want to go through page after page of results to uncheck each item I wanted to keep. As I was fussing and fuming, I noticed, at the end of the page, a phrase in very small font which said … and I quote …

Improve result with search options such as sender, date, size and more.

I clicked on the link, which brought up a form with a bunch of options. I filled in the sender box with the Google® Scholar sending email address (scholaralerts-noreply@google.com). To my delight, this resulted in all of the Google® Scholar alerts I wanted to delete, WITHOUT the emails I wanted to keep.

So, here is the procedure …

GMAIL Weeding Procedure Using Advanced Filters
Enter your search string in the Gmail search mail box as usual
Scroll to the bottom of the page
Click the link in the phrase Improve result with search options such as sender, date, size and more.
Fill in the resulting form as appropriate for your purposes