The Search Results Screen

Upon completion of a search, PsycCrawler displays the Search Results Screen. The contents of this screen always represent the most recently executed search.

At the top of the screen is a restatement of your query. This helps remind you how the current search results were achieved and may assist you in deciding how to refine your query.

If PsycCrawler was unable to access an active database or retrieve results from an active database within the prescribed "wait time", a message to that effect will be displayed at the top of the screen.

Below the query display is the primary component of the screen, the Hitlist.

The Hitlist

When executing a search, PsycCrawler assembles the records that satisfy your query, ranks them in order of relevance to the query and displays a brief summary for each of up to 60 of the most relevant records. This collection of summaries is called the Hitlist. Any term within a record that satisfies the conditions of your search query, thereby causing the record to be retrieved, is referred to as a hit, or hit word. A record containing a hit word is known as a hit record.

Each Hitlist summary contains four elements: a relevance ranking score, a brief description of the record, the name of the database from which the record was retrieved, and the size-in bytes-of the record. Optionally, each Hitlist summary may include the record's price. The description in each summary functions as a hypertext link that will retrieve the full text of the corresponding record.

You can use the Hitlist to analyze the success of your search, viewing the summaries to gauge whether the retrieved records might contain the kind of information you are seeking.

Note: If you execute a search that no records in the current database(s) satisfy, the Hitlist will contain the message "Search Produced Zero Hits."

The Relevance Ranking Score

Hitlist summaries are ranked in order of relevance to your search query.

You should use relevance ranking scores to determine which retrieved records are suitable for review. If the scores show a sharp decline in relevance at any point, you probably would not want to look at records beyond the drop-off; the less relevant records might contain relatively few hits.

If the slope of the scores is mostly level, it signals only a small distinction in relevance between retrieved records. In this case, you may want to refine your search query.

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