from our newly launched handbook Master BASIC Digital Tools for Research available on any Amazon marketplace.

With Master ADVANCED Digital Tools for Research, to be released at the end of April 2025, the two handbooks focus on conducting research projects using the most appropriate digital tools, techniques and resources, with smart information searching at the forefront.

Why? Because smart searching allows you:

  • to stay in control of your information, rather than letting the tools dictate what you should see;
  • to find the best data and information, even it is lost among millions of them;
  • to identify information disorders, indispensable in our fake news age;
  • to develop a critical and skeptical mindset toward the information you are exposed to;
  • to ensure quality research results.

Our last two posts discussed the best digital tools and the best techniques to conduct research projects, as well as how to “enter” any information. This present post is about smart researching skills.

10 smart researching competencies

Here are the ten competences necessary today to be a smart researcher especially when it concerns information intensive research projects.

  • Needs elicitation. This implies going beyond the mere words of a research request to uncover what is behind: the underlying information needs and the intentions. A valuable technique for eliciting needs is reformulation. This is especially valid when you work for someone. If I understand you correctly… is an excellent way to begin reformulating and is often a great way to get your requestors to explain much more than they originally intended.
  • To reformulate the request, you also need active listening competences, to “read in between the lines”, to get to the requestors’ message, their needs, intentions, assumptions, and expectations. In this regard, you may want to ask them about their “working hypothesis” and the results they anticipate getting in an ideal scenario. As a result of these questions, people are usually encouraged to open up and reveal more about what is really behind their requests and what their true intentions are. Try to make explicit what is tacit. And remember, there are always tacit content. When you do not have a clear requestor (doctoral thesis for example), there is nevertheless always an audience. Try to imagine one and specify it; this will give you some direction to your whole research process.
  • It is important to be able to quickly identify the best resources for the project: authors, sources and information systems and channels. Surely to get started, but also during the research process. Ask yourself which entities might most likely have spoken/written on what you need to find is a way to go about this. Before thinking about the information to find, think about sources, people and systems. Take the perspective of your audience and think about the resources and channels that match them the best. These are all shortcuts to find relevant information.
  • Being able to determine the most effective entry points for searching, i.e. the concepts and keywords that best represent the issues that need to be addressed is an important analytical competence to have.
  • To “translate” key concepts and key words into the search language of the different information systems you plan to use (i.e. basically into effective “search strings”) is critical. This means you need to be fluent in the search language of your different information tools.

    Besides keywords, most search engines use commands, functions and syntactic rules to specify a search. Some basic ones are AND, OR, NOT (i.e. the Booleans), some more sophisticated are FILETYPE:, SITE:.., ALLINTITLE:… , NEAR, etc. A search engine’s ability to fine-tune search strings (through commands and functions) is one of the elements that makes it a lousy or an exceptional information search tool.

    Despite its many biases, Google with its powerful Advanced Search screen offers a great alternative to smart searching without having to learn search commands, operators and functions. Unfortunately, few of the big popular search engines provide them anymore. Google is an exception. They are more frequent with professional information systems. Google Advanced Search screen is an excellent hands-on for smart searching.
  • It is also essential to be able to develop a search strategy and to prioritize tasks. It is so easy to get lost in the internet galaxy when one searches for information.

    Concretely, it means establishing some priority lists of resources, search terms and search strings, as well as a timeframe to avoid going overboard. About timeframe, and especially in a professional setting, the time (and resources) invested for a search have to be related to the value of the information your audience need; spending 10 hours for a « nice to have » information might not always be justified.

    Think about the return on investment of the search. Remember the Vilfredo Pareto’s 80%/20% rule (the last 20% is very labor intensive, and offers a low return on investment). Determine as well if the request will need to be updated later (in this case, document it precisely to be able to rerun it easily later).
  • Then comes searching, which consists in accessing as many resources as necessary keeping your focus and avoiding taking too many wrong avenues. If the needs of your research have carefully defined, your search should be targeted. Searching also implies selecting and prioritizing the information that best matches your requirements, and discarding irrelevant ones.
  • Processing results involves analyzing, grouping and categorizing them, as well as keeping track of where they come from. Document them carefully and remember the “reproducibility” criteria (as in all scientific research, results must be reproducible at a later stage). This is complex and time-consuming. To help you and your audience to process and retain them well, contextualize, connect, and justify your data and information in a way that makes them as meaningful as possible. Remember, it must answer (as much as possible) the “why this information” question.
  • In addition to documenting and connecting your results, you must be able to match them to your requirements in order to ensure they fully address the issues you need to resolve. Especially in the early stages of the research, identifying any gaps for further research is important.

    Then, the other vital activity in our “fake news” world, is to be able to evaluate and assess the information you need to deliver, using any of the framework we suggested, such as the “4R” one for Recent – Relevant – Reliable and Rich information.
  • Last but not least, being able to deliver contextualized, connected, meaningful and usable results is an important skill, one that adds great value to all your research efforts. Do not dump your results on your audience; rather, enhance them. And the success greatly depends on identifying the information needs. Back to the first competence.

In a nutshell, smart researchers should:

  • Know how to use their different digital tools: search engines, browsers, the new AI-based tools, the internet and the general web, understanding their respective pros and cons.
  • Know how to select keywords (a key aspect of any information seeking job, be it digital or not).
  • With search engines, know how to use search operators & commands in order to smart search and to craft powerful search strings to retrieve focused results. Alternatively, to be proficient with Advanced Search screens.
  • Be able to accurately capture the needs of any research project (this determines much of the research process).
  • Be skillful at managing the research process staying focused and efficient.
  • Be capable of quickly evaluating and assessing any information, matching each with what is needed, as well as spotting major information disorders.

Aside from advocating agility and organization skills, these competencies are similar to the findings of the 2017 Stanford study about lateral reading and digital information evaluation we mentioned earlier. Of PhDs and information professionals, undergraduate students and fact-checkers, the latter were the most agile ones, as they read laterally, quitting a website after a quick scan and opening a new window to judge the credibility of the original site, moving from site to site. The other groups read the websites vertically.

Our second handbook (Master ADVANCED Digital Tools for Research) discusses advanced search tools and techniques: various alternatives to Google, some deep web resources, some professional information systems, and some recent information channels, such as social media and multimedia. We see as well various competitive intelligence techniques, as they can greatly empower any researchers. Our Smart Researcher’s 10 Golden Rules conclude our handbook.