Searching for unknowns in new or interdisciplinary fields

Some of our users are newer to research in general, or new to a field in particular. This might be because you’ve changed fields recently, because you’re in a job that requires you to continuously tackle new challenges (like food safety authorities) or because you’re working on an interdisciplinary project. No matter the reason, the approach is the same: we recommend starting with using the Explore tool with a snowballing search approach.

STEP 1

Either with your own self-written problem statement or with an article link, build a visual map with the Explore tool. Start by getting an overview of the main topics, and dive into each of them by navigating around and reading first headlines, then clicking on the interesting headlines. Don’t forget to bookmark interesting articles, so you can find them again later!

STEP 2 (REPEAT)

Select the most interesting article(s), and use these to build new maps - alternatively, make some modifications to your original input statement based on what you learn in the process.

Our research shows that by repeating this by building 15-18 maps over a couple of hours, you will get a sufficient overview over the topic, find more spot-on papers, and be able to draw superior conclusions than if you had spent the same amount of time with a regular search engine.

ALTERNATIVELY, STEP 3

You can merge the collection or map generated data sets from Step 2 and use the smart filters to narrow down the list, using any of the search strategies outlined in ”search from <10,000 documents to find <150 relevant documents”.