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.