The Search

Step 3

While it may sound like a Nicholas Sparks novel (soon to be a major motion picture) or a haunting rock ballad from the 80s, this chapter’s title is where your pre-thinking is put to work. And it’s that pre-thinking that can actually save you time – hours and hours climbing out of the research rabbit hole.

We will switch things up a bit. Rather than continuing to show you how to build your search, you’ll walk-through a fully formed search in two parts, performed by your friendly Librarian. Pay close attention, as post-walk-throughs your will have opportunities to showcase your understanding and learn tips and tricks to shave time off your research while boosting relevant results.

There is likely no such thing as a perfect search; there are many different strategies and those strategies will change with your experience, the assignments you have, and the evolving design of the resources. But, in general a solid search is a balancing act.

Assessing a Search

A solid search attempts to achieve a balance between precision (retrieving what you need) and recall (retrieving all you need).

A high precision search finds a few items (low recall) but most will be relevant.

A high recall search has many results, with only some on point or exactly what is needed.

Precision and recall are inversely proportional.

The Newbie Search

Your first instinct with your research question was likely just to type in all the concepts into a database. Here is your newbie search without any brainstorming:

Feel free to perform you own, ‘newbie’ search and note both the relevance | quality of results and the number.

This search returned 5 results, however only a couple were on point. Given the amount of information produced, your spidey senses are likely tingling; this is not a sound search in terms of precision and recall. You will need better research to craft your writing, presentation, etc. We’ll put that brainstorming to work in the next search to up our research game and retrieve more relevant results.

Did You Know?

To better understand just how much information is out there consider the Knowledge Doubling Curve.

Buckminster Fuller (one of the best names ever!), a systems engineer and futurist, posited on the Knowledge Doubling Curve:

He noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of  the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.

This prediction was made in 2013 and few could foresee the explosion of information, especially with the burst of social media.

When you are wading through this explosion of information, it is not enough to go to trusted sources e.g., Library databases, but those sources need to be thoughtfully and strategically searched a.k.a. why you are here!