Literature Search Toolkit

The Literature Search Toolkit is a free web-based research utility developed by Dr. Chengkai Fan at Université Laval. It was initially created to support literature exploration within the IMOM Lab and is now shared with the broader academic community for research, teaching, student training, and curiosity-driven exploration.

The toolkit uses Google Scholar as its literature search source and provides a simple interface for building and refining academic search queries.

Main Features

• Enter Keywords
  Users can enter up to five search terms or phrases. Non-empty terms are combined using an AND-style search logic, meaning that the search aims to identify publications related to all entered concepts. Multi-word expressions, such as critical minerals or machine learning, are treated as phrases.

• Remove Keywords
  Users can enter up to five terms or phrases that should not appear in the selected literature. Remove Keywords are applied using OR-style exclusion logic. In other words, a publication is excluded when any entered removal term is identified in its title or available abstract. The toolkit also adds these terms as negative keywords in the Google Scholar query.

• Flexible Keyword Recognition
  Keyword matching is case-insensitive and recognizes common variations involving spaces, hyphens, underscores, slashes, and different dash symbols. For example, deep learning, Deep-Learning, and deep_learning are treated as equivalent expressions.

• Spelling Alerts
  The toolkit checks both Enter Keywords and Remove Keywords for possible English spelling errors before starting the search. Suggested corrections are displayed to the user, but keywords are never changed automatically. This is especially important for scientific terms, abbreviations, chemical expressions, and specialized terminology.

• Search Filters
  Users can define a publication-year range, select the desired number of results, and optionally limit the search to review papers. The review-paper option identifies records whose titles or available abstracts indicate that the publication is a review.

• Results and Research Overview
  Search results include the publication title, authors, year, citation count, and an available publication link. The toolkit also summarizes the most highly cited results, visualizes the distribution of publications by year, and allows users to download the retrieved records as a CSV file.

Important Notice

This toolkit is provided free of charge for academic, educational, and non-commercial research use only. It is intended to support initial literature exploration and should not replace a formal systematic review, bibliometric database, or expert assessment of the literature.

The toolkit is an independent research utility and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Google Scholar. Because it relies on Google Scholar access, search availability and response times may vary, and temporary access limitations may occasionally occur.

Open the Literature Search Toolkit