Systematic searching aims to find all possibly relevant research from multiple sources, the basis for an unbiased and comprehensive evidence base. Along with bibliographic databases, systematic reviewers use a variety of additional methods to minimise procedural bias. Citation chasing exploits connections between research articles to identify…

Discussion of information agents that search the Web on behalf of users focuses on ARIS, a shell for constructing information agents without coding that is similar to expert system shells. Searching is guided by knowledge about how pages on particular Web sites in a given domain are typically organized. (Author/LRW)

This article discusses three different online services providing federated access to finding aids relating to archives found in a number of repositories: the Archives Hub, Access to Archives (A2A) and Navigational Aids for the History of Science, Technology and the Environment (NAHSTE). While the scale of the services is very different, a…

For much of the twentieth century, Markov theory and Markov processes have been widely accepted as valid ways to view statistical variables and parameters. In the complex realm of online searching, where researchers are always seeking the route to the best search strategies and the most powerful query terms and sequences, Markov process analysis…