I use the google scholar alert system which sends me new studies made on a specific saved search. I'm looking for a way to exclude research conducted in some countries (or to only include some countries).
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3Based upon which criterion? If at least one author is affiliated with an institution in one of your blacklisted countries? Or all of them? ...?– O. R. MapperCommented Dec 9, 2015 at 7:46
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1This is a very vague question, I would even say off-topic here, as it is more related to a search engine configuration than academia. Further, note that my advice is based on the Google search engine, not Google Scholar in particular. Nonetheless, the best suggestion I can come up with is to use "-" in your query. Google tries to exclude keywords which are preceded by "-" from the results. I can't know if that would suit your criteria of filtering (it is rather shaky, as @O.R.Mapper rightly noted), but you can try something like "fourier transform -france -spain" and see if that helps you.– user3209815Commented Dec 9, 2015 at 8:11
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1@O.R.Mapper Are you talking about moral criterion or ethic one or technical one? Because if your talking about technical one, all the necessary info are written on my question. The technical criterion of the filter is "country", what else did I forget?– JinSnowCommented Dec 11, 2015 at 10:37
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1@GuillaumeCombot I think the under-specification comes from not knowing how you define research conducted in some countr[y]. Many papers have co-authors from multiple institutions in multiple countries; at what point is the research conducted in a given country? If the first-author is there? The majority of authors? Any author? &c.– user38309Commented Dec 11, 2015 at 10:48
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@GuillaumeCombot Yes, agreed, many do. But which cases do you want to exclude from your search? The answers given so far assume you want to exclude papers where any author is from a given country. Is that a correct interpretation of your question? Can you edit the question to more explicitly and precisely state the conditions you want your literature search to match? This will improve the question both because: a) all users can better determine whether the answers match your question well or not; and b) other users can determine more easily if your question matches a question that they have.– user38309Commented Dec 11, 2015 at 11:07
2 Answers
Try combining the -
operator with the site:
operator with the domain suffix for the country or countries in question. So e.g.
basketweaving -site:.fr -site:.uk
searches for basketweaving, but not in France or the UK. If site:
works in Google Scholar, this should be more effective than trying the (English!) name of the country.
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1I presume this will filter based on the website where the paper is posted, which may not have anything to do with where the research was conducted. Commented Nov 12, 2019 at 9:54
I do not suspect there is direct support for this in Google Scholar. (One must wonder if this is really a good filter to apply to one's literature search.) However, I have surprisingly good success testing the idea of prefixing -country
to a search query to exclude results with the keyword country
.
As an example, if I try author:[me] -denmark
only two of the papers I wrote while affiliated to my former Danish institution appear, and in both cases I had never indicated on the paper the country of my institution.
This may work reasonably well, because most authors indicate on the first page of the paper the address (including the country) of their affiliated institution. However, you will also get a lot of false positives (as in the two cases I mentioned above), and a lot of false negatives (as you exclude papers that use country
as an example in the text or that were published at a conference that was held in country
or where only one of many authors was from an institution in country
.)
But often when a tool does not support a specific functionality that one wants, it is worth wondering whether it really should or if maybe the search filter that you want to apply is only very loosely correlated with what you want to exclude.
Edit: This is precisely the technique that @user3209815 simultaneously suggests in her/his comment.