Project Search Help: Combine
The first step is to make a second search. The results of the second search will be generated just the same way as the first search. You have the option of picking the table (e.g. keywords, departments, years, etc.) from which you will select elements for comparison with the projects. You can also select whether you want the entries to be inclusive or exclusive, as before.
Once the search is complete, you will have another group of selected projects. The next step is to decide how to combine these results with the first search.
For example, you might do a keyword search for electricity and discover you have too many results. If you want to narrow the field, you might decide to select only MQPs from that group. The way to do that is to make a second search for all the MQPs. This will result in a large group of projects (half of them). If you combine this group with the first group in an exclusive way, then you will end up with projects with belong to both the MQP group and to the first group. This will eliminate the IQPs from the result, which may help home in on the desired result.
Two other options are elminate first and eliminate second which will eliminate entries in one group from the other group (in whichever order you specify). This is related to the exclusive, since it excludes projects that do not match criteria. For example, you might search for a year of 94 and then eliminate that group from some prior keyword search if you had some reason to do that. This would be the same as selecting all the other years, clicking them all, and then doing an exclusive combination. This would require checking every single year other than 94, though, so you can see that this eliminate option saves work for instances like this. If you wanted to select the MQPs from some project search, you might search for MQPs and exclusively combine the group. You could alternatively select the IQPs and eliminate them from the first group. There is no advantage either way for this MQP example, though, since it's only one click or the other. Sometimes the option might be useful, sometimes not.
These eliminate options only appear when you try to combine two groups. i.e. they do not appear when searching. If you wanted to search for the keyword of solar, but not those which had the keyword of electricity, then you would have to search for the first group, start a combination, search for the second group and then eliminate the second group from the first.
Once you combine the groups, you will get a report on the number of entries in the final combination. Based on that, you can decide to accept the combination or to discard it. For instance, you might want to discard it if you lose too much information.
A warning about combinations is that once you accept the combination, you lose the unique results of that first search. You can display or continue to combine the results with other searches, but you cannot go back to that first group without starting a new search.
Maintained by webmaster@wpi.eduLast modified: August 27, 2007 09:48:26