Answer: How can I find latest updates on topics of interest?

Staying on top of an emerging topic…

P/C MidJourney. Prompt: “unanticipated consequences, realistic”

… is a continual issue for professional researchers.

Often, your work can’t be answered and “solved” in a single search session, or even a single day, but must be compiled over a longer period. This is one of the defining characteristics of complex and sophisticated research problems–they take time. (See some nice work from Microsoft Research on this: Slow search: Information retrieval without time constraints.)

But for us, the Challenge is having some way to track emerging results and new insights in a field. How do we do that?

As I mentioned, the obvious way is to subscribe to blogs and newsletters that monitor the topic for you. That’s good, but suppose you’d like to get a bit more from the news directly?

Let me frame this as an SRS Challenge for you:

1. Can you find a way to limited search over a small number (say, 3 – 7) of high quality periodical sources of information for a particular topic for the past year? (In my case, I want to search for articles on “unanticipated consequences” during 2022. Your topic of interest might be something different.) How can I do that?

I quite liked SRS Regular Reader Krossbow’s post, so I’m going to borrow much of his response here. In particular, he focused on setting up multiple and different kinds of regular alerts from alert services…

My initial thoughts went to Google Alerts as that’s my normal tool when I want get updates on a subject. As you know, it runs your query of choice repeatedly and emails you the results. Here’s the official source for how to set up a repeating alert: Google Alerts

I also thought about searching social media feeds. Feedly is an RSS reader I’ve used since Google Reader was shut down. They allow you to set up regular feeds based on search terms, but that capability is in the paid tier. {Dan: I haven’t tried this. If anyone does let us know how well it works out.}

My thinking then went to my old favorite standbys of library research: EBSCO and ProQuest. My library gives access to current periodical corpora as well as ProQuest.com. Login through your university (or public library access point), and you too can create Proquest alerts.

{Interesting side-note: Clarivate acquired ProQuest in 2021–they also run Web of Science and services like EndNote, so things might change in the future. General SRS point: Things change. Stay up-to-date.}

Another set of resources your library might have access to is EBSCO Search which also allows you to set up alerts. Creating a Search Alert in EBSCOhost – Tutorial

I searched for [gale books alerts] to find Gale Alerts and RSS Feeds for Gale Books and Authors. {Looks like paid subscription is required, but this alert stream notifies you when a book with a title matching your query is added.}

My library uses Libby for some periodicals. If your interest is broad enough, you can set alerts when a new issue of a magazine becomes available. Set a Libby alert when new magazine issues are available.

Same for JSTOR (another aggregator indexing service like Proquest). See JSTOR alerts. (Again, you need to login here–check our your library for access.)

I went to SimilarSites (an easy way to find other web sites that are similar to one that you specify) and searched for sites similar to Proquest.com. This led me to several sites, the most useful of which is probably ScienceDirect has open access papers, journal articles with this tutorial for setting up alerts. ScienceDirect alerts tutorial.

As I read through Krossbow’s post, it reminded me that the SemanticScholar website also has an alerts system. Here is SemanticScholar’s alert service. In practice, it seems very similar to Google Scholar’s alert service; both index the scholarly literature, but they have somewhat different feeds and indexing times, so you’ll see somewhat different results.

When setting up alerts with these services, it’s important to get your queries right. For my original topic of interest, “unanticipated consequences” the trick is to find other expressions that will get you the insights you’re looking for.

When I just brainstorm a bit, I came up with these other expressions:

Original: unanticipated consequences

Next ideas, search for these phrases as well:

unexpected consequences

boomerang effect

didn’t expect

unanticipated effect

And then I ran out of good ideas. Is there some guide to help me broaden the search?

Sure! I did a search for each of these phrases and read a bit in the hits on each search. For example, the search for [boomerang effect] took me to the Wikipedia article on that topic. A quick scan of this article told me that the phrases “backfire effect” and “Barbara Streisand effect” might be useful as synonyms. Setting up an alert for each of these (rather than using an OR in a long query) lets me figure out which of these will be productive. I’ll let them run for a few days and turn off the alerts for phrases that don’t work out well.

When I step back to think about what I just did, I realize that I could mine Wikipedia for other phrases just by searching like this:

[ site:en.wikipedia.org “unexpected” ]

(Or, do the same thing with “boomerang effect” “Streisand effect” etc.)

When I did that query, I ALSO found that the query terms “paradox” “unexpected discovery” or “paradoxical effect” could also be useful synonyms. You can play this synonym expansion game forever, but don’t. I suggest you get a few, run a test search to see if the results are what you need, and then set up an alert with them, one at a time. After a week, keep those alerts that are useful; prune the rest.

One other idea… When I’m doing research like this, I often find it useful to search for the opposite of what I seek. What would that mean in this context? I might try setting up alerts for:

[ unanticipated benefits ] or

[ unexpected good outcome ]

It’s a trick, but one that’s immensely useful.

2. (Extra credit) Can you figure out a way to have this limited search run once / month? (In this case, you’d probably want to have the search extend over the past month, not the entire year.)

I’m going to save this part of the answer (it was extra credit!) for next week. Look for my comments then. Hint: this will center on Google’s Programmable Search Engine (formerly the Custom Search Engine, CSE.) Programmable Search Engine and will show how to search for those small number of quality sources.

SearchResearch Lessons

1. There are a number of services that provide regular alert services. Try them all! You’ll find that they cover very different information feeds and will give a broader coverage of ongoing news reports and research in your topic area.

2. Once you’ve set up your alert feeds, prune them as necessary. If you need to, set up a reminder to yourself to cut back on the alert feeds that aren’t high quality. Be sure to do this, or you’ll end up polluting your personal information feed!

3. To search for synonym phrases, look at other articles containing the phrases you use. Often, these articles will have synonyms for the concept you seek. (Writer typically hate reusing a stock phrase over and over, so they look for other ways to say the same thing.)

4. Another way to find synonymous phrases is to search on Wikipedia for the phrase you know, then read around finding other expressions. That’s the point of using the SITE: search.

Search on!