How to build a query

First of all, you will see that there are two different search fields for TOPICS and ORGANIZATIONS. The use of these search fields is straight forward: If you wish to explore the ecosystem of a particular organization or multiple organizations (e.g., a company like “Apple” or “Google”) use the ORGANIZATIONS search field.

If you wish to gather insights on any other particular field of interest (e.g., “artificial intelligence”), use the TOPICS search field instead.

Let’s assume that you would like to gather insights on “artificial intelligence” in general. In order to do so, you may simply enter multiple relevant keywords into the TOPICS field, like so:

If you click on the Search button now, SCOUT will perform analytics based on those three keywords. More precisely, SCOUT will base the analysis not only on documents and descriptions that contain the keyword “artificial intelligence” but also on documents that contain the terms “machine learning” or “deep learning”, as well.

Consequently, you may broaden your search by adding more keywords.

Boolean operators. You may notice that SCOUT translates your query into a form which involves what is called Boolean operators, in this case the Boolean operator OR: “artificial intelligence” OR “machine learning” OR “deep learning”.
This means that any document matching at least one of the keywords is used for analysis.
Consequently, the OR operator broadens your query’s scope.

For many use cases and quick analyses, these kinds of searches already provide enough expressive power. Consequently, feel free to try it out yourself before moving on to build more complex queries.

Now, if you wish to narrow down your search, you may use the (+ AND) button: clicking that button will provide you with an additional search field that allows you to refine the context of your query. For example, in case you are interested in the  application of artificial intelligence in medical imaging:

Boolean “AND” operator. Again, SCOUT translates your input into a Boolean query: (“artificial intelligence” OR “machine learning” OR “deep learning”) AND (“medical imaging”)
This means that documents and entities that match both queries on either side of the “AND” are being used for analysis, and only those documents and entities.
Consequently, the AND operator narrows down your query’s scope.

Again, you may add new relevant keywords to “medical imaging” in order to more accurately define the new scope of your query:

Finally, you may explicitly tell MAPEGY.SCOUT to exclude certain keywords in its search. For example, you may be interested in applications of artificial intelligence in medical imaging but with the exception of x-ray imaging. You can exclude a field of interest by adding keywords via the (+ NOT ) button, as seen to the right. That way, documents containing the keyword “x-ray” in the description will be excluded from the analysis.

SCOUT Query Builder. SCOUT’s query builder feature helps you with clearly and unambiguously defining the scope of your search:

• Type your search terms in the search field.
• SCOUT may match variations of your entered term. Use double quotation marks ("") to define an exact word or phrase. Please note that this would only influence results under Publications. We’re currently working on improving this functionality.
• Broaden your search by adding new terms to the search field: click on the magnifying glass or press Enter/Return if you are using your keyboard.
• Narrow your search by adding additional search fields with the (+ AND ) / ( + NOT ) buttons.
• Finally, click on the ( Search ) button to start the analysis and display the results.

SCOUT further assists your query building via the following search term suggesting features:

Autocomplete function. Start typing into the search field and you’ll see similar search terms appear. You can select and add all items of interest to your query.

Keyword recommendations. After adding a new search term: just click on the recommended keywords that you wish to add to your query. The number of recommendations can change based on the height of your browser window.