Add search history and allow searching with sets from the search history
Filter options and relevance ranking is one way to search, explore and discover, but it has limitations. To combine previous searches is standard in all kind of bibliographic and full text databases and would be a true enhancement. Most professional information specialists lack confident in search systems that only rely on filter and relevance ranking. Give us boolean search using sets from the search history!
Claes Eriksson
shared this idea
Added ability to save to Google Drive or MSOneDrive or to save only during your session in 2018.
-
Claes Eriksson
commented
I might add that there must be more technical issues in allowing search history to be saved "forever", i.e. after the session is ended. That require some kind of personal account and that would change Summon dramatically. I am not looking for that and would be satisfied if you during one session could elaborate with boolean logic upon the searches you made.
Looking at Scopus I can do that without logging in to my personal account. If I log in I can save my search sets and come back another day, but it is not necessary if I am content with performing my search operations during one session. -
Claes Eriksson
commented
@JimHammond
The search string and the number of records is to seperate things. It is not really combining search set 1 (8466 hits) with set 2 (4,365 hits). More like producing a new search using the terms in search 1 and search 2, e.g. combining set 1 (public transport AND gis) with set 2 (scheduling OR timetable) into ((public transport AND gis AND (scheduling OR timetable))The question about relevance is not an issue. The results from searches using search history could still be presented using relevance. Thus, combining relevance with precision. Could it be better?!
-
Barbara Vermaas
commented
I very much support this idea for a search history!
Whereas searching with sets, I'm not sure... -
James Hammons
commented
This sounds like a potentially helpful enhancement, but I have a couple concerns:
1. The notion of a "set" of records is problematic in Summon. Remember that we only get 200 items (soon to be increased to 1000) from any search. The most popular search in our Summon instance last week pulls 8,466 results. What does combining sets really mean when we don't even get an entire set of hits from most searches?
2. If the concept is tweaked to mean something like concatenating search strings -- i.e., create an "advanced search" by combining previous searches -- I wonder how this might impact relevance. I can't really think of a scenario where I would want to sacrifice relevance for any precision gains that might be achieved from Boolean combination of searches. That's when I would reach for my favorite subject-specific databases.
-
Anonymous
commented
yes