I know the subject of topical searches has come up from time to time over the years. Given the vastly improved Factbook in Logos 9, I suspect Faithlife intends that we all use the Factbook for topical research, rather than searches on the Topic data type. The creation of a Factbook icon where the Search icon used to be and changing the search icon to a smaller pale grey icon shows this emphasis.
I think topical searches is one place where Logos has much room for improvement. I know that manually tagging by topic is massively labor intensive and I recognize that Logos has improved in this area over the years.But a robust controlled vocabulary topical tagging is of immense value. It is pretty basic to the concept of a "library."
As far as I can see, to do topical research one needs to do several types of searches, since they all produce different results:
- Search the Topic data type (quite useful to the extent that FL has tagged topics in articles)
- Search the Topic search field (least useful since only a few resources use this search field, but you never know when FL chose to use this search field rather than the Topic data type)
- Search for headings in articles (can be very useful, particularly for Bible dictionaries, since it contains less noise than a full text search)
- Topic Guide (quite a useful starting place)
- The Factbook (much more useful in Logos 9 than earlier versions; the use of cross references to other articles is gold)
I would love to hear what people do for thorough topical research. If someone knows a type of "one stop shopping" to find topical information from all of these sources at once, I would love to hear about it. For now, I recommend using all of these methods, since they supplement each other and provide different results.
