Search Question

Floyd Johnson

I have a "Topical Search Collection" that is composed mostly of dictionaries and encyclopedias in my library.  

If I do a "Basic" search on "All Text" in the collections on "doubt*", I get "11,594 results in 108 resources".  Though this is too large to be useful, most of the initial results (when sorted by "Ranked") are truly applicable - composed of texts that have an entry of "doubt" or some variation thereof in their content.

Because 11000+ results is too large, I decided to do a search on "Heading Text; Large Text" on the same collection.  This time I get a very much more managable result of "27 results in 24 articles in  in 16 resources".  

However, almost all of the initial results from the earlier search are missing - though those results clearly contained books with "Doubt" in headings and large text as entries.  

Am I misunderstanding what "Heading Text" and "Large Text" refer to?  Am I using the search tool in some kind of ineffective way.  (NOTE:  I tried using the "Topic Guide", but found the results less than useful for my study.)

Thank you for any suggestions.

 

Dave Hooton

Large Heading was an interim measure whilst maturing Logos' Topic Search with their LCV database on selected Encyclopedias, Concordances, etc. Heading Text is where you would expect topics to be shown, but many topics are milestones, which are not visible to a text Search, but allow a lookup.

1. Large Text:  Doubt

.... doubt  ...

2. Heading Text:  Doubt

...  doubt is ...

3. Milestone: Doubt

.....   doubt ...

A text (Basic) search will pick up the word in all three resources. A search on Large Text/Heading Text will pick up 1. and 2.

A Topic Guide should pick up 3. and perhaps 1. and 2. if the resources are in the LCV.

For this topic, the Topic Guide gave me 2 more resources (Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, New Ungers Bible Dictionary)  than the Large/Heading searches. Unger's article was found in a Basic Search along with 132 non-significant matches. Baker with 180 hits came up top of the ranked results along with the other Topic Guide resources

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/468967#Comment_468967

Dave Hooton said:

Baker with 180 hits came up top of the ranked results along with the other Topic Guide resources

Continued:

Bakers hits were more significant (better) than the Topic Guide hit whilst Unger's languished.  ABD was highly ranked but its result wasn't significant!

So I would conclude that a ranked search could be useful if Topic Guide seems to be lacking. Some LCV books (Baker) don't handle a topic as you would expect, and ABD doesn't have a universal grip on topics!