Researching for a project using indexing

He goes to the search engines and when he enters a term his mind gets astonished by the number of web pages that he receives in return. He gets confused by which sites he should access and which ones he should not. The search engine return also throws up a lot of sites that have no relevance to what he is looking for. But they have come up in the list only because they contained some of the keywords that he had entered.

The researcher knows that he needs another strategy because the one he is using is not working out. That is when he decides to switch to a technique called indexing. The researcher wants articles on labour and work. Now when he is entering this word in the search engine, he is confronted with two problems. Labour could either be used in the context of giving birth or it could be used in the context of giving birth.

The researcher knows that unless he enters the correct word with the right context he will not get the response that he is looking for. So he uses the indexing method and writes precise statements so that he can eliminate all unwanted websites. As the researcher starts to use the indexed terms he finds that he no longer has to think of synonyms and alternate spellings of those terms. The indexed terms themselves return the searches that he is looking for.

There was a time when the researcher would not have known what the term indexing meant in the context of the search engine. He would have looked it up and he would have come to know that indexing means that the citations in the database are assigned terms from a regulated vocabulary. These terms also go by other names and when the researcher is describing this technique to somebody else he would also be aware that he can use words like descriptors. He also has the option of referring to these words as thesaurus terms. Those who are doing their research in the field of medicine would also be familiar with the terminology medical subject headings.

Before the researcher can get down to indexing, he first needs to understand his own material well. He starts to look through the questions that he needs to answer for his project and then decide which topics are of interest to him. What are the angles is he looking for when he is working on his investigation. These questions play a large role in the indexing work of the researcher.

The researcher also has to understand what the scope of his research is. He knows that there is no point in him collecting information on content that is not relevant for his work. When he does collect it then the only thing that he will do is to edit it from the final draft. Therefore, there is no point in him wasting his time over inconsequential searches. Once he has made a decision on what he wants then he can go ahead and either do a comprehensive search where he accumulates all the information that he can on a particular subject or he can do a focused search where he can get certain topics from a discipline. There are times when the researcher is simply looking for one article or one chapter of a book, and once he has found it his work is accomplished.

While doing the indexing and searching on the web, the researcher knows that he needs to be equipped with some knowledge on how search engines work. He has to learn quickly on how judiciously the words AND, OR and other punctuations can be used to one’s advantage to get the best results.

There are times when the researcher finds some content and he is not satisfied with the results. He looks at the terms that he used and refines his search and comes up with a new set of ideas that he implements the next time he attempts indexing. And he keeps on repeating the process till; he finally gets the results that he is satisfied with.