Search is very important and my experiences have been similar to what you described.
But I’ve often found myself wondering: what’s the solution?
I would love nothing more than to always be on top of current discoveries in my field. But it just seems impossible to do.
Google and similar tools are great but they only do part of the job. You have to know what to search for, and it is very easy to get caught up in your own biases and only search for ideas, keywords, etc. that you are most familiar with or currently most interested in, thereby easily missing many relevant results. This has happened to me often.
For example, I was once doing research on persistent random walks. Unfortunately, I searched very hard but could not find many results. Later on, I found that the mathematical model I was using was equivalent to the worm-like-chain (WLC) model in polymer physics. That discovery led me to discover a huge explosion of research and results quite relevant to my own work that I simply was not aware of before.
Semantic search technologies are helping but none of them have the ‘depth’ that true scientific literature searching requires. If you know of any tools that are of help in this regard, I would be greatly interested in them and I’m sure the community at large would be as well.
I wish you’d asked me this in 2012. I don’t quite remember the exact research process that led me to that connection. I had been searching for results relating to persistent random walks using terms like ‘persistence time’. But that won’t give you any WLC results. If you instead search for ‘persistence length’, you’ll get WLC results. The mathematics are identical; it’s just in one model it is a random walk through time and in another it is a random walk through space.
Search is very important and my experiences have been similar to what you described.
But I’ve often found myself wondering: what’s the solution?
I would love nothing more than to always be on top of current discoveries in my field. But it just seems impossible to do.
Google and similar tools are great but they only do part of the job. You have to know what to search for, and it is very easy to get caught up in your own biases and only search for ideas, keywords, etc. that you are most familiar with or currently most interested in, thereby easily missing many relevant results. This has happened to me often.
For example, I was once doing research on persistent random walks. Unfortunately, I searched very hard but could not find many results. Later on, I found that the mathematical model I was using was equivalent to the worm-like-chain (WLC) model in polymer physics. That discovery led me to discover a huge explosion of research and results quite relevant to my own work that I simply was not aware of before.
Semantic search technologies are helping but none of them have the ‘depth’ that true scientific literature searching requires. If you know of any tools that are of help in this regard, I would be greatly interested in them and I’m sure the community at large would be as well.
How did you find this out?
I wish you’d asked me this in 2012. I don’t quite remember the exact research process that led me to that connection. I had been searching for results relating to persistent random walks using terms like ‘persistence time’. But that won’t give you any WLC results. If you instead search for ‘persistence length’, you’ll get WLC results. The mathematics are identical; it’s just in one model it is a random walk through time and in another it is a random walk through space.