Unlike other social media or search platforms, LinkedIn does not allow you to target by things like gender, age, marital status or interests. If you’re interested in picking up the basics, like Fastcase's Facebook page so that you are the first to know the dates for the 2014 year.It’s important to note what you can and cannot search for using LinkedIn’s search field. It's not magic, it just takes practice.įor more information on boolean searching, Auriemma will teach an introduction to Boolean searching webinar for Fastcase about once a month (to start again in January). When law students come and ask complex reference questions, they often think it is magic that I am able to retrieve relevant results so quickly with boolean searching when they have spent hours trying to sift through natural language results. And that’s a disconcerting revelation because out of my previous three law clerks, not a single one was well-versed in Boolean searching."Īs a legal research expert, I still only use natural language if my boolean searching does not retrieve the results that I am looking for, which doesn't happen very often.
He goes on to say "that as it stands right now natural language searching is not a replacement for a well-crafted Boolean search. But this generation of law students is used to natural language searching on Google, so it is hard to get them to understand the benefits of boolean searching on the databases.Īs Auriemma put it, they're putting a lot of stock into an algorithm they can't see - meaning we do not know why certain results show up with natural language because the algorithms are not made public. With boolean searching, the researcher has control over what the database retrieves instead of leaving it up to the database's algorithm to determine what is useful. We (the law librarians) take the time to teach the research process using boolean searching because it is still the most precise way to search - thus saving time and money. Consider this: if a natural language search was as effective as a keyword search, it would be superfluous to pay an attorney for legal research." I got into the habit of assuming the algorithm was better than I was at crafting a search, but the truth is that right now, they’re not. Somehow, when I became an appellate attorney and had access to WestlawNext through my firm, all of that training went out the window. I thought about my research question, figured out which words probably appeared closest to other words, and crafted a narrow and specific search. In law school, I was a master of Boolean searching. "I often wonder whether the Googleification of legal research isn’t a terrible thing for the profession (at least in this stage of the technology’s development). I first saw the post mentioned on Law Librarians, and it's about a topic that I am rather passionate about, so I thought I would re-post here.Īuriemma discusses the difference in legal research when using boolean searching (terms and connectors) versus natural language in WestlawNext.
I love this post by Joshua Auriemma about legal research on the databases (in particular WestlawNext).
0 kommentar(er)
