Searching Topical Books Has a Major Problem

I have several Bible dictionaries in a collection. I wanted to search for the topic of "prophecy" (topic:prophecy). (Imagine my surprise when only one listing appeared. Doing a word search returned 2,300 entries which I had to hunt through to find the topic of "prophecy" in the other dictionaries. (See postings about the inability to shrink or hide a book's listings in searches.)

Upon checking the tables of contents in the dictionaries, I discovered that "topics" were actually alphabetical ranges of topics. In one dictionary, 'Prophecy" was a "subtopic" of "Profane-Providence." What should have been a quick search took a long time. I have used Logos and several other Bible software programs for more than 15 years. I have never seen such a grouping of topics. I hate to appear un-Christian, but whoever came up with that scheme does not seem to have a clue as to how logical searching should work. Topics in dictionaries and other topically-oriented books should be listed separately as the original authors intended. An alternative would be something like a "subtopic" filter. Either way, Loogs will need to rebuild the tables of contents.

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Mark Smith

Bruce,

I, too hate the way some of the TOC have been arranged. It makes scanning for an article extra difficult. I'd prefer the old L3 way of collapsible entries listed under the letters of the alphabet.

That said, I don't believe the problem you experienced has anything to do with the arrangement of the TOC. Logos does not search or scan the article headings in a search. This is one thing we've cried about and Logos plans to address the concern in some way.

BTW: The search term 'topic:' while seemingly making its way all around the forum does not seem to be a Logos 4 recognized search parameter. Sean Boisen of the Logos staff had not heard of it and assumed it was not supported. He may have been uninformed, but I can't recall a Logos person telling us this works.

When I run your search in my collection of Bible Dictionaries I get no search hits at all under 'Library Results.'

When I leave out 'topic' I get thousands. In both I get several dictionaries listed with articles on the subject under the 'Topic' section.

Topical searching is a mess. Logos promises to work on it. Your trouble is one example of why this is urgently needed.

Dave Hooton

have several Bible dictionaries in a collection. I wanted to search for the topic of "prophecy" (topic:prophecy). (Imagine my surprise when only one listing appeared. Doing a word search returned 2,300 entries which I had to hunt through to find the topic of "prophecy" in the other dictionaries. (See postings about the inability to shrink or hide a book's listings in searches.)

You stumbled upon a Field called topic which you search with topic:<word>

topic:prophecy gave me Library results in Logos Hymnal Media Resource

topic:salvation gave me Library results in Logos Hymnal Media Resource

To see why, open the resource and look at Resource Information, the cicrcled i. Under the heading Search Fields you will see how it may be searched - the Hymnal has topic amongst a lot of others!

But the L4 version of topics is what appears under the heading of TOPIC in Basic Search. It does that by keylinking to English Headwords in a dictionary (you will see that term under Indexes in Information). It also gets topics from topics.logos.com.

What were listed in L3 as topics were multiple names that often did not appear in the article's text let alone the article's title or Headword. L4 will recognise the Headword and that is the only topic for the article eg. compare Harper's Bible Dictionary for Judgement Seat in L3 and L4. If L4 doesn't recognise Headwords then the book is not indexed. Illustrated Manners and Customs of the Bible has many "topics" in L3 but none in L4!

Robert Pavich

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/42815#Comment_42815

Bruce,

I understand that Logos is adressing this issue due to a high volume of requests...

In the mean time; there are things you can do to get more "topic friendly" searches.

You can make a collection of the typical search results resources as seen in the V3 screen shot.

Second; you can sort "by ranked results" and not by book. This gives more "topic headings" as far as I can see...

No...it's not perfect, nor is it an exact sub for "topic browser" but it's what works best for me...

Bruce Gilliland

Mark, Dave and Robert, thanks for your responses. Mark, you got several dictionaries to show in the topics list. Unfortunately, I have only one of those, but it did display (New Bible Dictionary). It appears that topics in your other dictionaries are indexed. In my dictionaries (Easton, Harper's, Holman Illustrated, Nelson's New Illustrated and Zonderan Dictionary of Bible Themes), the word prophecy does not seem to be indexed as a "topic" word. I assumed this is because it is not at the top level and thus falls into the word-level indexing.

As to the use of the filter word "topic," I made an assumption that is was a valid filter word. I tried "headword" with no better success.

From Mark's results, it appears that "topics" (main subjects in the dictionaries) are indexed and appear in the Topics list for some dictionaries for "prophecy" but not for other dictionaries. Or in his dictionaries, the word prophecy appears at the main level in the table of contents as it does in the New Bible Dictionary.

Robert, I re-visited my ranked list of 2,300 entries. Upon closer review, I saw the main topic in several of the dictionaries (but not all) on the first of 14 pages in the entires list. But I was as likely to see an entry for the word in some context that meant nothing to my needs.

In Quick Verse 2009 I opened my dictionaries. In the search dialog, I typed in my word (prophecy), selected Use Open Books, selected my search type as "Text in Titles." I got back a short list of the main articles in the dictionaries. That was what I wanted. That's what I want Logos 4 to do.

Robert Pavich

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/43013#Comment_43013

Robert, I re-visited my ranked list of 2,300 entries. Upon closer review, I saw the main topic in several of the dictionaries (but not all) on the first of 14 pages in the entires list. But I was as likely to see an entry for the word in some context that meant nothing to my needs.

Bruce, sort by rank and that should get you the more "topical" type headings.

As for things not related...I look at it this way...

marriage....ok...main topic....

But sub topic

Levite marriage

Bridgegroom (Christ)

Transaction

engagement

etc...

these are all valid topics and sub topics if you're studying the subject of marriage..

this seems like a pretty useful result...

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/43013#Comment_43013

In Quick Verse 2009 I opened my dictionaries. In the search dialog, I typed in my word (prophecy), selected Use Open Books, selected my search type as "Text in Titles." I got back a short list of the main articles in the dictionaries. That was what I wanted. That's what I want Logos 4 to do.

That is basically what L4 is doing in a selected set of dictionaries. If you click on (open) one of them you can then use right and left arrow keys to see that topic in books that are not listed.

Please don't try to search on random "filter" words as Resource Information will tell you precisely what Search Fields you can use - of course they may not apply to all resources. Headwords are the "topics" or titles you can enter into the text box of the open resource (like an English Dictionary) but the only tool that can look for them is the TOPIC part of Basic Search (L3 uses the Topic Browser).

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/43013#Comment_43013

As to the use of the filter word "topic," I made an assumption that is was a valid filter word. I tried "headword" with no better success.

From Mark's results, it appears that "topics" (main subjects in the dictionaries) are indexed and appear in the Topics list for some dictionaries for "prophecy" but not for other dictionaries. Or in his dictionaries, the word prophecy appears at the main level in the table of contents as it does in the New Bible Dictionary.

Dave is right about 'topic:' being a possible search term. The trouble I've found is that nothing (virtually) is searchable by topic. In my library of 3,000 volumes there are just four or five that I can find that state they are searchable that way. Dave's example of the Hymnal is one of them. There is a map set or two, Images of the Holy Land, and that's about all that I can find.

Dave did point out the headword indexing that dictionaries have. However, we cannot limit our searches by headword. Basic search will look in the headword index to find the word we are looking for which is why dictionaries come up under 'Topic' in the search results. But there is no 'headword:' search term.

Topical searching is just poorly implemented at this time. If many more resources were indexed by headwords that would help. Searching the TOC would be another way to get more topical results, but the TOC is not indexed at all in any resource (except dictionaries where the TOC and headwords are basically the same).

Sean Boisen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/43013#Comment_43013

It appears that topics in your other dictionaries are indexed. In my dictionaries (Easton, Harper's, Holman Illustrated, Nelson's New Illustrated and Zonderan Dictionary of Bible Themes), the word prophecy does not seem to be indexed as a "topic" word. I assumed this is because it is not at the top level and thus falls into the word-level indexing.

You're partly correct. These resources aren't yet "topically indexed" in the same way that New Bible Dictionary is: we're working on it. But you won't see (new style) topics from these books yet. You will see topics from them in the Topics section of the Passage Guide.

It's not because the words aren't at the top-level, however.

Sean Boisen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/43044#Comment_43044

As to the use of the filter word "topic," I made an assumption that is was a valid filter word. I tried "headword" with no better success.

From Mark's results, it appears that "topics" (main subjects in the dictionaries) are indexed and appear in the Topics list for some dictionaries for "prophecy" but not for other dictionaries. Or in his dictionaries, the word prophecy appears at the main level in the table of contents as it does in the New Bible Dictionary.

Yes, "topic:" is a recognized filter word, but it's implemented in so few cases that it's really better to forget about it, because it won't provide the results you want.

Bruce, if you look at previous threads marked topic or topics, you'll find a lot of discussion about what does and doesn't (yet) work for topical searching.

Sean (who's getting better informed all the time [;)] )