Find Hot Areas of Research?
TOPIC: In the scientific and technical areas much important research comes from universities worldwide. Dissertation Abstracts Online (File 35) contains the subject, title and author to almost every American dissertation accepted at an accredited institution since 1861. In addition, from 1988 forward citations for dissertations from selected British universities and European dissertations are also included.
For this search we want to know what important areas of research are being conducted at the University of Toronto. We will use the RANK command on Dialog to perform a statistical analysis on the descriptor terms from the dissertations.
COMMAND SUMMARY
BEGIN 35
SELECT CS=(UNIV?(1W)TORONTO)
SELECT S1 AND PY=2007:2008
In the Set Links pane, click S2 > Tasks > RANK
Check Descriptor (DE) and click OK
HOW TO...
1. BEGIN File 35, Dissertations Abstracts, to see the latest research.
2. SELECT the corporate source field (CS) to determine the hot areas of research at the University of Toronto.
Note that the proximity connector (1W) is needed because this is a word-indexed field and (1W) takes the place of the stop word "of."
Parenthesis are also needed so that both terms are in the CS field.
3. Limit the search to the latest years of publication (PY=).
4. In the Set Links pane, click S2 > Tasks > Rank. |
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5. Almost any phrase-indexed field can be RANKed. Here, we RANK the Descriptor (DE) field to determine the line of concentration by checking the box before the field name and clicking OK.
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Notice in the ranked list that the two top research areas at the University of Toronto are computer science and engineering. Other types of engineering are also high on the list.
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RELATED HOW DO I...? SOLUTIONS
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