Searching Journal Articles for a Passage
I know there are multiple threads on this subject, but I can't seem to find what I want. Let's say that I'm researching the end of Mark's Gospel. There is an article on this in BBR 18 (through Theological Journal Library vol. 15). How do I get Logos to tell me it's there? It would be nice to get this to come up in the Passage Guide on Mark 16:9-20, but it does not. I can do a search for this reference but I will get a whole lot of results that are just passing comments about the passage; how do I know that in BBR 18 I have not just a passing comment but an entire article on the subject? I would like this to be one of the first things I discover, not something I have to go out and look for.
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David, too many results is a vexing issue for many. The way you would discover this particular piece of information is by selecting to search only Heading Text in your journals collection. The search term I used was <Mark 16:9-20>. That found your article and one in Priscilla Papers volume 7 which has nothing to do with the long ending of Mark.
I am not confident that tagging has been consistent enough in the journals that you would not miss other relevant information doing the search in this narrow way.
Since you know the term "long ending" might occur along with the reference, you could search all text in your journals for <Mark 16:9-20> AND "long ending". I found a few other articles you might be interested in.
Tagging is not done in a way that identifies the central subject of an article, which I would love to see. Therefore you have to sort through lots of results or get creative about what you search for. Sorry, I believe that's the best there is right now.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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[Y]Mark Smith said:Tagging is not done in a way that identifies the central subject of an article, which I would love to see.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Mark Smith said:
The search term I used was <Mark 16:9-20>.
Another way to narrow the search down even further is to do that search with quotation marks which means only that specific passage will show.
e.g. <"Mark 16:9-20">
Using this in my library I have 55 results in 44 articles which is a lot more manageable.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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David Sloan said:
I know there are multiple threads on this subject, but I can't seem to find what I want. Let's say that I'm researching the end of Mark's Gospel. There is an article on this in BBR 18 (through Theological Journal Library vol. 15). How do I get Logos to tell me it's there? It would be nice to get this to come up in the Passage Guide on Mark 16:9-20, but it does not. I can do a search for this reference but I will get a whole lot of results that are just passing comments about the passage; how do I know that in BBR 18 I have not just a passing comment but an entire article on the subject? I would like this to be one of the first things I discover, not something I have to go out and look for.
The obvious first step which has not been mentioned so far is to create a collection with just journals. I have such a collection titled Periodicals which includes all resources of type: Journal and type: Magazine. That way whenever new resources are added to my library these are dynamically included in that collection. I currently have 2223 resources fall into this dynamic collection.
I then setup search to look at the following text fields: description, heading text and Large text. And I narrowed the search right down by using the following verse range criteria: <bible = mark 16:9-20>
This yielded me one result from my first search.
I then decided this was a little bit to narrow a result, surely in 2,200 + periodicals there would be a little more comment on this topic so I determine to relax the restriction on the range by removing the "=" from the criteria and i got three results.
The first and last result look useful, the middle one looks to be not so relevant. But looking at the two relevant results I notice (as Mark I think mentioned) they both include "Longer Ending" in the title so I altered my search to make it about these words rather than the reference. This gives me four results two relate to the same journal article, hence now I have three journal articles that may be of use. The new one turned up come from Biblical Review.
But three articles ? Is this all there really is in all these journals so I took a new approach and rather than search for "longer ending" I tried mark ending (which is effectively Mark AND ending). This pointed me to 7 articles that might be of use. If this had yield too many results I could have changed it to mark NEAR ending but was not necessary in this case.
What to take away from all of this David:
1. Use collections to narrow your searches.
2. User search fields to further refine your search
3. a) Often you will need to run more than one search to find articles relating to your topic of interest.
b) Use the results on one search to modify your follow on searches.
c) It won't always be the most obvious search that will yield you the most useful results. In this case even though it was a particular passage that was of interest, it was a set of words that gave the most useful results due to the nature of the topic
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Thanks for the detailed responses! This is quite helpful. It still would be nice to have the central subject of an article identified as Mark Smith suggests, but without that at least your suggestions give me the best I can do with what we've got. Thanks again.
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David Sloan said:
It still would be nice to have the central subject of an article identified as Mark Smith suggests,
Totally agree David
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