Template:Google scholar cite/doc

Usage
Creates a link to the following citation tool: Universal reference formatter. This allows a user to store and communicate Google Scholar searches in the form of wikitext. Otherwise, users would use the citation tool interactively, presumably to generate cite journal (or, less commonly, cite book) template calls, but they would have no easy way to store their actual searches.

The template takes two unnamed parameters and seven named parameters. You may mix the named and unnamed parameters; named parameters override unnamed parameters where they overlap.

Unnamed parameters

 * 1) Search keywords. The keywords named parameter overrides this, if present.
 * 2) Text to display for the search link. The linktext named parameter overrides this, if present.

Named parameters

 * keywords: search keywords to appear anywhere in a scholarly article. Separate them with spaces. Use double-quotes around phrases. Overrides the first unnamed parameter, if present.
 * title: search for text to appear in the title of a scholarly article.
 * author: search for articles by specific authors, or an author whose name contains a search word.
 * publication: search for articles in a specific publication.
 * yearlow: search for articles published in or after a particular year.
 * yearhigh: search for articles published in or before a particular year.
 * linktext: text to display for the search link. Overrides the second unnamed parameter, if present.

How to use
Finding reliable sources for a Wikipedia article, and then citing them in footnotes with citation templates, can be tedious and difficult. Citation tools can help. One such tool is Universal reference formatter. This tool lets you search for scholarly articles with Google Scholar, and then click a link that appears in the search results, to generate a Cite journal template call (or a Cite book, if the search result is a book). The Universal reference formatter works well on its own, with a form-based interface, but the tool itself provides no simple way to store and recall your searches, and to show other Wikipedia users what you did. The Google scholar cite template adds those functions, enabling knowledge of the Universal reference formatter to spread efficiently by user recommendations.

If you need to try different search keywords while hunting for a reference, you might like to keep track of which searches you have run, or you might want to come back later and try variations on searches you ran earlier. You can do this by making a user subpage to keep notes about the topic you are researching. You can start by constructing a Google scholar cite template call for your first search, then copy, paste, and edit it into a list of successive searches. Saving your user subpage will let you recall your searches for further exploration.

You can tell other people about the searches you have run, and let them try generating Cite journal template calls from your searches, by adding one or more Google scholar cite template calls to messages you leave on their talk pages. Your recipient then needs only to click the resulting link(s) you provided, to see the same search results pages you did.

You can leave a record of the searches you ran to find references for an article, by placing Google scholar cite template calls on the article's talk page. Then other editors can easily repeat or extend your searches.

Thus this template is merely a way to store and communicate the searches you run with the Universal reference formatter. This template itself is not suitable to place in articles; it is only a means to the end of generating Cite journal template calls which go into article footnotes, and to let other users see how you generated them (if you wish).