As you might remember…

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

… I’m also working on another book about Unanticipated Consequences. In particular, you might remember that 18 months ago, I asked about how to do “slow research” on that topic.

I’m happy to tell you that my research has been going well, although slowly. The good news is that I’m getting close to the finish.

But that brings up a different problem: I’d like my research to be as up-to-date as possible. In particular, I’d like to be sure that I haven’t missed anything in the past year.

This makes me think–how can people stay up-to-date on a particular topic? 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?

We’ve talked about using Google Alerts before, so that’s not what I mean. 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?

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.)

This is the kind of tool that pro researchers use, or would like to, if they could figure it out. Can you show them how to do this?

Let us know how you found the answer to this!

Search on!