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🔍 Search strategy for Google Scholar

Rely on Flinn for your Google Scholar Search

Characteristics of Google Scholar

  • Google Scholar is considered "grey literature" because the majority of its content is not peer-reviewed.

  • It is best suited for highly specific searches related to Post-Market

    Clinical Follow-up (PMCF), safety, and performance.

  • It should not be used for background information, overviews, or state-of-the-art (SOTA) reviews.

👍  Take advantage of Google Scholar's ability to search within the full text of articles.

👍  Create short, focused queries targeting specific device names or device-specific information.

⚠️  Avoid using long date ranges, as outdated studies with many citations can dominate results. Instead, use smaller date ranges for more recent and relevant findings.

 

How does Flinn help you navigate Google Scholar more effectively?

Screenshot 2025-12-16 at 13.47.51

  • Flinn integrates Google Scholar into your searches like other data sources, streamlining the time spent on searching, screening, appraising, extracting, and documenting.
  • Results available on Google Scholar can also be found on Flinn.
  • Search results are ranked by relevance, prioritizing the most recent and most cited papers, just like Google Scholar.
  • If a search returns too many results, Flinn displays only the first 200, preventing information overload and focusing on the most relevant data.
  • By default, Flinn excludes citations and patents to ensure higher-quality results. filters can be added upon request
  • Open-access (OA) papers available are directly loaded into Flinn
  • Starting with version 2.5, you can use the automatic Flinn deduplication feature of the Screening assistant for results from Google Scholar and PubMed within your searches, enhancing result clarity and efficiency.

 

Building your query for Google Scholar on Flinn

  • Focus on understanding the search output rather than constructing overly complicated search strings.

  • Keep queries straightforward and avoid over-reliance on advanced operators like + or (#) since Google Scholar's search logic may change over time, potentially affecting support for these operators.

  • We recommend to create a separate query for google scholar searches.
  • Apply the filter AND PUBLICATIONTYPE: ("Review") in the query to only see Reviews.

What are the supported basic operators?

    • AND: Used to restrict the search results
    • OR: Used to broaden search results
    • NOT: Used to exclude terms (translated as “-” automatically)
    • (): Parentheses are not supported
    • intitle: Used to search for a specific word in the title
    • source: Used to search for a specific word in the source eg. journal name
    • author: Used to search for specific authors

⚠️  Avoid copying and pasting search strings directly from PubMed. Instead, create customized queries tailored to Google Scholar's logic.

⚠️  Parentheses () are not supported in Google Scholar.

⚠️  Google Scholar automatically enriches all search terms with plurals and synonyms. Use + before a term to disable automatic enrichment.