Modern researchers, who grew up Googling for everything, approach their research differently as against the previous generations. Hence, their expectations from the modern research and development (R&D) search tools are also different. Modern researchers expect R&D search tools to search across databases, full-text articles, pre-assess an article’s relevance, have domain-specific search filters, and produce trusted results. Even so, why are these five requirements important to them?
Young researchers expect intelligent discovery as it is efficient. Consequently, a seamless search experience, which connects them to the information available across multiple databases, is important to them. Hence, today’s researchers prefer a search tool that is capable of searching across databases. Similarly, they expect to arrive at insights efficiently. Therefore, modern researchers prefer an R&D search tool with full-text search capability to a search tool limited to searching abstracts. Full-text search provides them with richer information from which they can identify critical patterns and insights.
The current generation wants to pre-assess portions of the full text of a potential article before exploring it further. They expect the R&D search tool to have this capability to prevent being disappointed after investing time and money on the full text by reading the citation and abstract.
Modern researchers expect a search tool designed around semantic search that considers the researcher’s intent to get at the contextual meaning of terms. Semantic search would help them overcome the imprecise nature of keyword searches and negate the chance of missing relevant content if they use terms to narrow a search. The reason modern R&D researchers want the search tool to dispense information from trusted sources is that they would like to spend their time gleaning insights and surfacing innovative ideas instead of frittering it away vetting information sources.
Briefly, modern researchers want their R&D research tool to have these critical capabilities so that they can maximize their research time. Consequently, providers should aim to address these challenges, and deliver a search experience by incorporating these critical requirements.
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