Finding resources published in or by someone from a specific country is not as easy as finding resources in specific languages. In some library databases, the location or country filter represents the country the resources are about, not the country it was published in or the nationality of the author(s). For example, a paper on COVID rates in Ghana written by an American researcher would be included in the list of results if the filter is set to Ghana. This filter can still be helpful for finding resources, but doesn't necessarily increase the biodiversity of one’s research. There are databases that have a more effective "country" filter that instead focuses on country where the resource is published. This is most common in Newspaper databases like Nexis Uni. To use these filters effectively, follow the "Using Country Filters in databases" tutorial below.
It is also difficult to ascertain if an author is from a particular region. Many publications include which institution the author is affiliated with, and this can be incredibly useful, but researchers need to keep in mind that academic institutions often hire people from all around the world. A researcher who is a faculty member at, for example, the University of Washington can be an citizen of India and represent a non-western viewpoint of a topic. To get a robust picture of an author's country or regional experience, researchers will need to do some extra research and look at the author's profiles, which is shown below.
One of the best ways to find resources from a specific area is to use a database that is dedicated to collecting research from a specific region or country. The "Resources by Region" box on the "Resources" page is especially helpful for this!
Google Scholar does not have a country filter like many of the other databases in the Resources tab. However, you can set the search engine to find results that are on webpages associated with different countries. Instead of using a filter, you can use a Country Code. Country codes are affixed to the end of web addresses like ."com", ".gov", ".net" , but they often denote where the website is hosted. For example, a site for a French clothing store may end in ."fr".
It is important to note that this would filter out diverse sources that were published in Western sources or hosted on western databases.
To do this in Google Scholar, enter your search terms a you typically would. At the end, include "site:[Country code top-level domain]".For example, if I wanted to see articles about colonialism specifically from Brazil, I would enter the following:
This will bring up items about colonialism that already exist in a normal Google Search about "colonialism" but now we seeing only those results that are hosted on Brazilian websites.