Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Google Scholar indexes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.
To search Google Scholar for a Systematic Review we will use Publish or Perish software. Publish or Perish is available from Harzing.com and provides an interface to several databases, including Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and others. For Google Scholar, the PoP interface is highly desirable, as you will want to export citations from your search and that is cumbersome in Google Scholar, as you have to select each citation individually.
If you are familiar with database searching you will be familiar with the Boolean Operators OR, AND, NOT. OR as an operator retrieves search results where any term searched is found/included. So, a search for This OR That will return results with This, results with That, and results with This and That. Search results from the Boolean Operator AND will return results that must include both terms. A search for This AND That will only retrieve results where both terms are present. NOT is generally not recommended, but is exclusionary.
In Google Scholar the Boolean Operators are represented syntactically by the pipe character | which is the Boolean OR operator, the Space character which is the Boolean AND, and the minus character - which is the Boolean NOT. So, a search statement might look like this:
"blood poisoning" | "endotoxin shock" | pyemia | pyaemia | sepsis | "septic shock" | septicemia "balanced crystalloid" | "hartmann solution" | "isolyte" | "lactated ringer's" | "ringer's lactate" "normal saline" | "saline solution" | "sodium chloride" | "0.9 saline" | "0.9 nacl"
Where the concept of blood poisoning is represented by a variety of terms OR'd together (pipe character) and then ANDed (space character) to the concept of balanced crystalloid, variety of terms OR'd together (pipe character), ANDed (space character) with saline, also represented by a variety of terms together (pipe character).
**Importantly, Google Scholar restricts searches to a 256 character limit, so search statements like the one above need to be carefully constructed.**
Publish or Perish is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses a variety of data sources to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and presents a range of citation metrics, including the number of papers, total citations and the h-index. 
When the Publish or Perish software opens you will be presented with the choice of database you wish to search. In this case, we're selecting Google Scholar. After selecting the database you wish to search, a set of search boxes will appear. We will use a search statement similar to the one shown above. The search is pasted into the Keywords: box as shown.
The search is pasted into the Keywords: box as shown. Then click the blue "Search" button. Note, in the example shown above the Maximum number of results was set to 200. You can increase this to 1,000 as an upper limit.
The search will process in real time, which can be a little under a minute to several minutes, depending on the search complexity and the number of citations you've chosen to retrieve.
When the search is complete, you will see a list of results.
You can then Save Results via the menu on the right side of the software application. As you can see from the image, there are a number of file formats from which to choose. For use in a Systematic Review here at Case, and assuming you are using Covidence to manage your screening process, the RIS format is preferred.
