The Google for graduate supervisor search

This tutorial will be a follow up of my previous tutorial on searching for potential supervisors. If you haven’t read it please do. A reader commented on my previous post saying “I have been looking for a supervisor that has interest in oil spill studies..Very [hard] to find ..dont know what else to do”.

In this blog, I will show you another approach to search for potential supervisors. This approach may prove faster especially when all that is known is your research interest. Another benefit is that it can help you find academics in niche research areas that you wouldn’t easily find with a normal search. These days, there is Google for many categories of searches ranging from images and datasets to jobs. This one can be called Google for graduate supervisor search.

Step 1: Type keyword in Google scholar

Go to the website scholar.google.com. Type the research interest in the search box. In this example it is “oil spill”.

Step 2: Click author with profile (underlined)

You will find a list of articles and their authors below. The underlined names are those who have Google scholar profile. Click on any underlined name. In this tutorial we click on “M Fingas”.

Step 3: Choose the specific research interest

That takes us to the profile of Merv Fingas. Notice his research interest includes “oil spills”. But here we are really interested in the research area not just on one person’s profile. We want a list of all profiles with research interest in “oil spills”. So we click on “oil spills”.

Step 4: Explore, vary keyword

This will now bring up the profile of all the researchers with interest in “oil spills”. It ranks them according to the number of citations shown in the right column. The number of citations gives a rough idea of the authorities in the field of that research area.

Without an ‘s’, i.e. if you search for “oil spill” you might get slightly different results. Keep that in mind until the Google search engine becomes smarter.

It means you should tweak your keywords with synonyms and related areas. For example, I could vary keywords like deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence to capture relatively similar areas of research interest. Also make sure you are using concise keywords that are closely associated with what is known in that field.

For example in “deep learning” research, we find the notable Yoshua Bengio as top on the list with close to 300k citations.

Step 5: Profile academics and contact them

When we click on “Steven Wereley’s” profile, we can glance through his publications to see if they are of interest. The Homepage button can take us right into his personal website or group website, or we could just search him out on Google with his name and affiliation.

On their website, we could look out for their contacts, open positions and any information about contacting them.

I hope this was helpful. Best wishes in your search.