Page 108 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Unit 5: Information Retrieval

Notes

If information retrieval is carried out without considering the structure of the search
string and the relationships between the terms, it takes much more time, work and
effort to find relevant sources.

Conceptual Structure

The purpose of analyzing the conceptual structure of the topic is to gain an overview of the most
important aspects and boundaries of the topic, as well as constructing a hierarchical structure of the
relationships between the concepts.
It is unwise to start searching for information with the first keywords that spring into mind; the
results of the search are better if the conceptual structure of the topic is analyzed before conducting
the search. Keywords can be invented by considering the concepts of the topic of the search or by
writing down words that seem important when thinking about the information need. Alternative
terms such as synonyms can be helpful as well. Including alternative or related terms to the search
string will improve the results of the search and make it possible to retrieve information that may
otherwise not be found. When considering which terms to choose and looking for alternative terms,
the information seeker can resort to dictionaries or thesauri and other controlled vocabularies. Mind-
mapping can also be helpful when trying to understand the conceptual structure of the topic and
deciding which terms to include in the search string.

The Structure of the Search String

The reason why the conceptual structure of the topic is so important is because the actual search
string used in conducting the search is hierarchical: keywords are linked together with Boolean
operators that indicate relationships between concepts and keywords. When linking alternative or
related terms that represent or refer to the same concept, the Boolean operator OR is used. If, on the
other hand, such clusters of alternative terms, each representing a different concept of the topic, are
linked together, the operator AND is used. What this basically means is that when using the operator
OR, documents that contain either one of the keywords will be retrieved. If, on the other hand, the
information seeker wants to find material that contains two or more different concepts, the keywords
are linked with the operator AND. For example, if the topic of the search is “young people and
violence in computer games”, the core concepts of the topic are young people, computer games and
violence. On the basis of these concepts, the following search string can be constructed:
Young people OR minors OR teenagers OR youth OR adolescents
AND
Computer games OR game consoles
AND
Violence
If this search was conducted without analyzing the conceptual structure of the topic first, the
information seeker would probably just link two or three keywords with the AND operator: young
people AND violence AND computer games. This is certainly the fastest and easiest way to compose
a search string, and the results of the search would include documents that contain all of these
keywords. However, the search string can be expanded by adding alternative terms linked with
OR, which increases the amount of results.

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