How do I search for publications by author, title or date?

Last reviewed: September 28, 2026 · Markdown version

Use a scholarly index instead of a general web search, and search by the thing you actually know — the author, the exact title, or the year. Both big free indexes have a syntax for each, and it is short. This page covers Google Scholar and PubMed from their own help pages; for where free full texts live, see where to find research papers.

Google Scholar: operators and the sidebar

By author. "Use the "author:" operator, e.g., author:"d knuth" or author:"donald e knuth"."
By title. "Put the paper's title in quotations" — its example is "A History of the China Sea".
By date. Results are "normally sorted by relevance, not by date". "Since Year" in the left sidebar keeps relevance order but drops older papers; "Sort by date" shows "just the new additions". On a small screen without the sidebar, those options sit in the dropdown labelled "Year".
Everything at once. Advanced search is "in the side drawer", and "lets you search in the author, title, and publication fields, as well as limit your search results by date".

Two limits Scholar states about itself. Coverage: "We index research articles and abstracts from most major academic publishers and repositories worldwide, including both free and subscription sources" — so an abstract in the results does not mean the full text is free. And freshness: "We normally add new papers several times a week. However, updates to existing records take 6-9 months to a year or longer." A corrected title or author list can take that long to show up (Google Scholar Search Help, read 28 September 2026).

PubMed: search tags in square brackets

In PubMed, a tag in square brackets goes straight after the term it applies to:

Author. Last name plus initials works on its own; "If you only know the author’s last name, use the author search field tag [au], e.g., brody[au]." Names are truncated automatically, so to stop that, "use double quotes around the author's name with the author search field tag [au], e.g., "smith j"[au]." One trap: "full author name searches will only retrieve citations from 2002 forward".
Date range. Put a colon between dates and add the tag, e.g. "influenza AND 2000:2010[dp]", where [dp] is the date of publication.
Exact phrase. "Enclose the phrase in double quotes". If the phrase is not in PubMed's phrase index, the quotes are ignored and a message says so at the top of the results.
Free full text only. Use the text-availability filter, or add "free full text[sb]" to the query.

(PubMed Help, read 28 September 2026.)

Following an author

For one person's new work, Scholar's help suggests checking whether they have a Scholar profile and using its Follow button for "New articles by this author"; without a profile, search [author:…] and use the envelope icon to create an alert. If several people share the name, add "co-author names or topical keywords" (Google Scholar Search Help, read 28 September 2026).

After the search: the papers you already have

Finding a paper and finding a sentence in a paper you downloaded months ago are different jobs. For the second, a reference manager's full-text search helps — how Zotero's works — and so does searching a folder of PDFs at once.