Academic Citation Finder Brief

A systematic citation search brief with Boolean queries, journal lists, and inclusion criteria that make literature reviews faster and more thorough.

Best For

•A grad student starting a literature review needs Boolean search strings ready to paste into Google Scholar instead of losing a day to trial-and-error keyword guessing.
•A grant writer building the background section of an application needs a fast way to identify the 5-8 journals most likely to contain relevant peer-reviewed support.
•A think tank researcher drafting a white paper needs clear inclusion and exclusion criteria set before searching, so the citation list holds up if a reviewer asks how sources were chosen.

Prompt Template

Create a structured research brief to guide a systematic search for academic citations on the topic: [RESEARCH_TOPIC]. The citation search is for: [PURPOSE, e.g., a literature review / a white paper / a grant application]. Required citation types: [CITATION_TYPES, e.g., peer-reviewed journals, meta-analyses, systematic reviews]. Date range: [DATE_RANGE, e.g., 2015–present]. Include: (1) 10–15 specific search queries optimized for Google Scholar, PubMed, or JSTOR using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and field tags, (2) A list of the top 5–8 most relevant academic journals in this field to search directly, (3) Key authors or research groups known to publish in this area: [KNOWN_AUTHORS], (4) Inclusion criteria, 4 specific criteria a study must meet to be included, (5) Exclusion criteria, 3 criteria that disqualify a study, (6) A suggested citation management workflow using [CITATION_TOOL, e.g., Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote]. Format all Boolean search strings in code blocks for easy copy-paste.

Pro Tip

Ask for search strings using both field tags and free-text terms together, since relying on field tags alone in Google Scholar often misses recent preprints that haven't been indexed with full metadata yet.

Example Output

A sample of what this prompt produces once you fill in the placeholders.

Search query: ("remote work" OR "telecommuting") AND ("productivity" OR "output") AND ("longitudinal" OR "panel study") in code-block format for direct copy-paste. Relevant journals: Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Inclusion criteria: peer-reviewed, published 2018 or later, sample size over 200. Exclusion criteria: opinion pieces, single-company case studies, non-English publications. Suggested workflow: import results directly into Zotero with the browser connector, tagging each entry by theme on import.