SCOUT search queries need to be unambiguous and with accurately defined scope. In the following, we explain some typical use cases.

The bird’s eye view: General topic search for top-down overview and content exploration

If you need a fast overview and/or wish to explore relevant content: enter simple, general keywords into the search field that pertain to your field of interest.

Example: Electric vehicles

In order to create a general search and analysis on the topic of electric vehicles, just enter “electric vehicle” or “electric vehicles” into the search field.

Word stemming. It doesn’t matter whether you enter “electric vehicle” or “electric vehicles”, SCOUT will automatically search for both plural and singular forms. Similarly, it wouldn’t matter if you entered the term “charging”, “charge”, “charged” etc.
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.

The SCOUT autocomplete function might give you quite specific suggestions such as “electric vehicle batteries” or “electric vehicle conversion”. You can ignore those for now since you wish to create a general overview on “electric vehicle” alone.

Once you have entered “electric vehicle” as a keyword into the search field, you can further broaden your query by using the recommended keywords supplied by SCOUT, or keywords that you come up with on your own. Those could be, for example, “electric automobile” or “electric truck”.

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Press ( Search ) to show the content you wish to explore: all the relevant documents, major players, startups, and trends in the field of electric vehicles.

The deep dive: Specific topic search for detailed analytics

Specific queries often require the compounding of more general queries to focus on specific applications.

Example: Charging systems for electric vehicles

If you wanted to, you could simply enter “electric vehicle charging station” into the search field. However, a query like this might yield not enough results to perform adequate analytics because MAPEGY.SCOUT is inclined to base its analysis only on documents that will contain this particular phrase. In that case, it may be better to combine two general queries by a Boolean “AND”:

1. Define a general topic search for the field of electric vehicles by adding relevant keywords for “electric vehicle” into the search field. This will yield, for example, the following query: "electric vehicle" OR "electric automobiles" OR "electric trucks" OR "electromobiles" OR "electric car"
2. Press the ( + AND ) button.
3. Into the new search field that will appear, enter a general topic query for the field of charging systems. For example: “charging system” OR “charging station”

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Press ( Search ) in order to show content and analytics on this more specific field. By exploring that content, you might find new keywords you wish to add to your search, or keywords to exclude via ( + NOT ) in order to retrieve more accurate results.

Mapping business ecosystems: Organization search

If you conduct a general query for an organization, searching for the name under which the organization is most commonly known usually provides SCOUT with enough information to retrieve relevant results and perform accurate analytics. However, in some cases, it may be advisable to further expand the query.

Example: General Electric

Organizations sometimes use abbreviated or otherwise altered names to publish patents. The company General Electric, for example, also publishes patents under “Gen Electric”. In the press, the company is often abbreviated as “GE”. Furthermore, the names of subsidiaries of General Electric might be important to add as well.

Therefore, General Electric and subsidiaries thereof might be known under a whole list of names. A more comprehensive query to define the scope of “General Electric” might therefore look like this:

“General Electric” OR “Gen Electric” OR “GE Additive” OR “GE Aviation” OR “GE Capital” OR “GE Digital” OR “GE Global Research” OR “GE Healthcare” OR “GE Lighting” OR “GE Power” OR “GE Renewable Energy” OR “GE Ventures” OR “GE Oil & Gas”.

Using this query will cause SCOUT to cover all or almost all information related to General Electric, including its subsidiaries.

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Abbreviations. You might be inclined to simply search for “GE” instead of the long list of subsidiaries above. You may very well do so, and most information in SCOUT will be accurate. However, note that your query might match other organization names (or patent applicant names, research author affiliations etc.), as well. In general, you should be careful when querying abbreviations, especially very short ones.

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