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

Last reviewed: September 28, 2026. HTML version: https://docfindapp.com/answers/search-for-publications

**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](https://docfindapp.com/answers/find-research-papers).

## Google Scholar: operators and the sidebar <ul> <li>**By author.** "Use the "author:" operator, e.g., author:"d knuth" or author:"donald e knuth"."</li> <li>**By title.** "Put the paper's title in quotations" — its example is "A History of the China Sea".</li> <li>**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".</li> <li>**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".</li> </ul> <p>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*](https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html), read 28 September 2026).</p>

## PubMed: search tags in square brackets <p>In PubMed, a tag in square brackets goes straight after the term it applies to:</p> <ul> <li>**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".</li> <li>**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.</li> <li>**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.</li> <li>**Free full text only.** Use the text-availability filter, or add "free full text[sb]" to the query.</li> </ul> <p>([*PubMed Help*](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/help/), read 28 September 2026.)</p>

## Following an author <p>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*](https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html), read 28 September 2026).</p>

## After the search: the papers you already have <p>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](https://docfindapp.com/answers/search-in-zotero) — and so does [searching a folder of PDFs at once](https://docfindapp.com/answers/search-inside-multiple-pdfs).</p>

Related: [Where can I find research papers?](https://docfindapp.com/answers/find-research-papers) · [How do I search in Zotero?](https://docfindapp.com/answers/search-in-zotero) · [Search inside multiple PDFs](https://docfindapp.com/answers/search-inside-multiple-pdfs)