10Min Research - 30 - How to Find a Questionnaire using Google Scholar and Mendeley?

Finding questionnaire items for latent variables becomes reliable only when researchers trace each construct back to its original scale—not just to a later paper that reused it. The workflow laid out here starts with a targeted search (e.g., “green organizational identity” or “green identity”) and then moves straight into the paper’s methodology section to locate where measures are described—often under headings like data collection, sampling, and measures. From there, the key task is to identify whether the study adopted an existing scale (and whether it used it in full or trimmed items) or whether it developed something new. For green organizational identity, the measure is described as a six-item scale developed by Chen in 2011, originally grounded in organizational identity work by Thomas in 1996. The practical takeaway: once a later paper lists items (sometimes as a table, sometimes as paragraph text, sometimes in an appendix), the safest move is to locate Chen’s original 2011 source and extract the scale directly, then check for any item omissions and demand justification for those changes.

The same principle applies when using Google Scholar and Mendeley together. Google Scholar helps locate the original paper where the scale was first proposed and validated; Mendeley helps manage and search large libraries of PDFs. The transcript demonstrates this with a second construct—servant leadership—where searching within a Mendeley library can surface papers that mention “measure” and “conceptualization and measurement,” including studies that provide tables of questionnaire items. But it also highlights a common failure mode: some papers show questionnaire tables without citing the original source of the scale, or they omit the scale entirely, leaving only factor descriptions or operationalization text. In one example, a paper contains servant leadership statements but provides no source for the instrument, and the factor structure is described without clear item provenance—creating “lack of clarity” about what questionnaire items are actually being used. The recommended response is to avoid such ambiguous scales and instead locate the original instrument.

To recover the servant leadership scale, the transcript points to a “Len” multi-dimensional measure using a 28-item Likert-scale instrument. Even then, the original paper may require careful reading: items can be removed after EFA (exploratory factor analysis), so the “final” set may not be explicitly labeled as a finalized questionnaire. The method becomes: identify the item list and factor loadings, then map each high-loading statement to its corresponding factor. This factor-by-factor extraction is presented as the way to reconstruct the questionnaire items accurately when the paper doesn’t provide a clean, finalized table.

Overall, the approach is a repeatable checklist: search by construct name in Google Scholar, jump to methodology to find the cited scale source, then use Mendeley to manage and quickly locate relevant PDFs. Most importantly, extract items from the original scale paper (Chen 2011; Len’s instrument) and verify whether later studies adopted the scale fully or modified it—because questionnaire integrity depends on provenance, not convenience.