Good idea! What about sending us any search set you find useful and we might publish the best of them on our website?
Best,
Eric.
Finally took the time to really follow your instructions. Really helpful and I feel I’m beginning to get it. Judging from the other reactions above I think that a few such examples posted on a FAQ might be helpful to a lot of people. On a variety of subjects. Or other users could post their examples.
I see that “Plugins” and “Sets” are crucial.
I can see how you choose when the topic is, say, computers.
But when it’s vague on history or more general subjects it kinda hit and miss.
One specific: you include “Guttenberg - German” as a plug-in.
Can I add the English language version as a URL in “sets”?
I’ve re-read the manual and I’m not clear when it’s a “set” and when it should be a “plug-in.”
thank you for your patience
Bill_DeVille wrote
I’m using this but I’m wondering about the best way to follow up. Let me explain. I do an initial search which generated 280 matches. I’ve saved these to the archive. I now work through these one by one (not in any particular order) extracting the information I’m interested in and creating relevent entries in DT as I go along. Now I want to repeat the seach from time to time in the way you suggest adding new items to the archive and then processing those in the same way. I would like to be able to see which items in the archive I have not yet looked at and effectively hide items I’ve already examined or which were not of interest to begin with. If I delete them from the archive then the next time I run the search I presume it will find them again and I’d have to re-process them all over again. So what I’ve done is to create subgroups of the original archive group and I place the processed items into the subgroups. What I’m wondering is if I re-run the search and use the Filter Archive option will it exclude the items in the subgroups from the new search results? If not is there any way to achieve what I want ie. to be able to exclude all previous found search results for a given search yet keep the list I am processing manageable in size and clear in context so I can easily identify the items I have yet to finish processing?
I’ll confess that when I get several hundred hits from a DA search, I don’t try to look at every one of them. Most of the time, I’m looking for a few pages that would make useful references in my DT database. No one has ever paid me to exhaustively search the whole Internet for every reference to a topic, nor am I inclined to do so.
In reviewing search hits, I may jump back and forth between the Digest and Page views of the search window. The more familiar I am with a topic, the easier it is to select 5 or 25 hits that I’ll add to my DT database. I will often look for sources (sites or authors) that I consider to be authoritative. Sometimes I’ll pick hits to go into my “Junk Science” or “Nutty Items” groups in my DT database – there’s a lot of that kind of stuff out there (sometimes in respectable publications, but often in public policy debates and in court decisions).
Most of the time, I don’t archive search results. There’s only so much hard drive space, or time to read stuff. So I don’t set my searches to automatically archive results.
I do archive search results of topics that are of continuing interest, especially when I want to keep up with the literature. (See my earlier post in this thread about that.) Repeating those search sets occasionally (perhaps weekly or monthly) results in smaller numbers of hits than the first run, so it’s easier to scan the results for interesting new items. Note: Always save the incremental results to the archive, so that they don’t show up again the next time the search set is run.
I can’t answer the question as to whether one can create subgroups in an archive that hold just the tiems already reviewed (the “main” group would hold those items that haven’t yet been reviewed), and how DA would filter results next time the search set is run. How about it, Christian? If that doesn’t work now, it might be a useful feature for a future version.
Ok, I’ve just done a test. I ran a search which returned 88 matches and used Add All to add everything to the Archive. I then created two subgroups and dumped the archived items into the subgroups. I then ran the search again and only got three hits only one of which was already in the archive. So it basically looks like I can use groups and subgroups to manage the found items which is exactly what I wanted.
This is for a study/research project and as I progress my searches will certainly become more specific but at the initial stages when one may know little ot nothing about a subject I believe my approach has value.
OK, this may be asking for trouble, but what happens if you clear the cache and then run the search again?
ChemBob
I ran the search again after having quit out of DA for some time and I also cleared the cache first. It only found three matches. All three were alreday in the archive although they don’t have a date which probably explains why they reappeared. It looks as if it does not exclude duplicates if they don’t have a date. Otherwise it still appears to work as I hoped.