Skip to Main Content

Faculty of Engineering and Technology: Google searching skills

This guide is designed to meet the information needs of students and staff from the Engineering and Technology Faculty at the Vaal University of Technology. Please refer to the blue tabs for more information.

Google searching skills

 

Google Scholar only contains academic information - with NO advertisements 

Phrase searching ensures that you retrieve more relevant results

Group your keywords/themes together though using inverted commas, e.g. 

"bearing lubrication"
"predictive maintenance"

Even in one search:

"solar energy" "residential homes" "South Africa"

 

On the left hand side of the search results page, use filters to limit results according to:

  • DATE - Since 2021, 2017, or select a custom range
  • PATENTS
  • CITATION included/excluded

 

For a more relevant result list, add intitle: or allintitle: before keywords in the search box

This will ensure that you retrieve documents with those keywords in their titles, e.g.

Intitle: "bearing lubrication"
Allintitle: "solar energy" residential homes" "South Africa"

 

To ensure that you stay up to date with newly added information on your topic from Google Scholar, select create alert on the left hand side of the search results page

 

Step 2: Enter your e-mail address

Step 3: Indicate how many alerts you wish to receive per day/week

Step 4: Click on create alert