Answer: How can you find search phrases beyond your own brain's power to imagine?

 Expanding your thoughts... 

The "Walkie Talkie" building in central London has a giant unanticipated consequence. At certain times of day, the windows reflect the sun's rays to a point creating a hot spot that can damage cars unlucky enough to be parked at the focus.

  ... is a key step for doing SearchResearch research.

1. What can a researcher do to find other words and phrases that would help in doing online searching for such a topic?  Let's consider my topic--unanticipated consequences--how can we find other helpful search terms and phrases to seek out and understand this topic?  Ideas?  

Note that what we're looking for are other ways to say "unanticipated consequences." While getting synonyms for each of these two words isn't a bad idea (unanticipated = unexpected, surprise, etc. while consequences = effects, results, etc.), you'll miss a bunch of equivalent phrases or terms. From my own reading in the area I knew that phrases like "cobra effect" or "perverse outcomes" were equivalent, but my brain doesn't answer questions like "tell me all of the other terms and phrases" for this idea.

You could do the obvious synonym search with a search engine.

The Challenge this week was to imagine that you're doing research on a topic that's big, complicated, and difficult to render in just a few words.  How do you start to search for such a beast? How do you expand your mind (and search behavior) to other phrases, terms, and ideas? That is, you could do this (note that you need to use double quotes, or you'll get synonyms for "unexpected"):

It's interesting that Google is giving me synonyms for "unforeseen consequences."  I guess that's the same as "unanticipated consequences," but it's a bit odd.  

If I try Bing, I get this, which isn't quite as useful: 

EXCEPT that in the lower right corner, there's a contribution from CoPilot (i.e., ChatGPT4) suggesting that I try "boomerang effect," "collateral damage," or "Dutch disease." (I hadn't heard of Dutch disease before, so that was a new one to me--it means an apparent causal relationship between the increase in the development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture).)  

But I thought this might be a great chance to try out LLMs as a way to get suggestions about equivalent phrases--that is, after all, what they're really good at doing.  

So I prompted each of the top 5 LLMs for [give me a list of the top ten terms or words that mean the same thing as "unanticipated consequences"].  Here's the spreadsheet with the results, which looks like this: 

You can see a pretty good suite of options here, including several that I hadn't thought about ("unforeseeable repurcussion" or "collateral impacts").  

But we had a great set of suggestions from SRS Regular Readers: 

remmij: 

type in "unintended" and let the suggestions populate.

Here's what I get when I follow remmij's strategy.  It's not a bad way to start.  

From Arthur Weiss:  

Now we can use ChatGPT and similar tools. So I put in this prompt: [I'm trying to find books on the topic of "unanticipated consequences". What synonyms should i use in searching for this topic?] 

(Arthur generates the same list I show above.)  

You can combine these with broader concepts such as "policy," "technology," "social change," "economics," or "decision-making" to refine your search further.

I thought it odd that "black swan" wasn't listed so I asked again. (It's useful to have some ideas to back up what the AI gives you).

"Black Swan" is indeed a relevant term when exploring the topic of unanticipated consequences, especially in the context of rare, high-impact events that are difficult to predict. Here are some additional related terms that might be useful:  Black Swan events, Chaos theory, Butterfly effect, Emergent phenomena, Systemic risk, Tipping points, Complexity theory, Cascading failures, Disruptive events, Unknown unknowns, Contingency theory, Rare events, Outliers, Wild cards (used in futures studies), High-impact low-probability (HILP) events

UC Librarian Donald Barclay wrote:  

My go-to for this is to turn to the experts and try to figure out what language they use. In the case of unanticipated consequences, I might search the term in PsycInfo ($) to see if psychology has anything to say on the topic. I might also search the phrase in Social Science Abstracts ($) and/or in an engineering database like Compendex’s “Engineering Village.” ($)  If I find that experts in a field use different, possibly more precise, language to describe what I’m researching, I can then search those terms. An obvious example is that non-experts commonly drop the phrase “split personality” to describe a certain kind of mental illness. Psychologists, on the other hand, use phrases like “disassociative identity disorder” to more accurately describe the phenomenon commonly, but incorrectly, known as “split personality.” By searching the term used by the experts, I’m more likely to encounter information created by experts and less likely to encounter information created by someone who has watched too many episodes of Dr. Phil.

Searching “unintended consequences” in PsycInfo got 340 hits, so I will need to refine that search to make it useful. It does happen that, as an unintended consequence, the first hit in PsycInfo told me about a book I do not know but which seems promising, Good Intentions: Max Weber and the Paradox of Unintended Consequences. Looking at the full record for that first hit, I was treated to some PsycInfo subject terms that might lead me in fruitful directions if I combine them with “unintended consequences.” These are: Choice Behavior (major); Intention (major); Social Processes (major); Analysis; Consequence

Pro tip: When you find a promising article in a database, always look at the subject terms that have been assigned to it.

Krossbow:  

Suggested using PowerThesaurus to find wide-ranging synonyms.   (Dan: This is a great tool that I'd totally forgotten about!)   

 

Here's what it gave me:  unintended consequences, unforeseen consequences, unforeseen effects, their indiscriminate effects, uncontrolled effects, accidental consequences, accidental effects, accidental results, inadvertent consequences, inadvertent effects, incidental effects, unanticipated effects, unanticipated outcomes, unanticipated results, undesirable effects, undesirable outcomes, undesirable reactions, undesirable results, undesired effects, undesired outcomes, undesired reactions, undesired results.  

RB: 

Built Wiki-Guided Google Search (a kind of front end to do effective Google searches over the Wikipedia). That site contains: Wiki-Guided Google Search, which searches on Wikipedia articles to find concepts related to the ones you're searching. When RB tried searching for "unintended consequences," he got query word recommendations which were both specific (North American Free Trade Agreement, Eliza Armstrong case) and conceptual (Perverse incentive, Structural functionalism).

The second tool on that site is Clumpy Bounce Topic Search. It determines what Wikipedia categories a relevant page belongs to, determines the most popular pages in that category, and makes the ten most popular pages available. This time when RB searched for unintended consequences, he discovered the category "Consequentialism" and generated a search containing the terms unintended consequences, "Consequentialism", and "Experience machine", which dropped him deep in to the wilds of philosophy search results.

2. Same question, except this time I want to search for books on the topic of unanticipated consequences.  (Yes, I know I can go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, AbeBooks, Google Books, or the Internet Archive.)  What's the best way to find the top 10 books on the topic? 

Unsurprisingly, many of the same tricks that worked above also work here.

When I did the cross-comparision of LLMs suggestions for books, I found this:

which was a pretty decent selection.

Donald Barclay wrote:

As for the books part of your question, you can always resort to not just looking at reviews, but considering where a book has been reviewed to get some idea of how it is regarded. Has the book been reviewed in important journals for the field it covers? Has it been reviewed in outlets like the NY Review of Books, the NY Times, the Times, etc.? On the other hand, metrics like “New York Times bestseller” are worthless because it’s beyond simple for publishers to manipulate bestseller lists. You can also look up a book title in a source such as Google Scholar to see how many times it has been cited. A lot of citations is not necessarily an endorsement, but at least it shows you how much attention has been paid to the book. Google Scholar will also direct you to book reviews that might not turn up in Amazon.  

remmij also suggested going to YouTube and searching there for our topic. I've done this before, and I'm glad remmij brought this up. The results are surprisingly rich and worth reading:

SearchResearch Lessons

There are so many here... but here's a quick summary:

1. Try synonym search. Seems obvious, but you'll find a few great ideas.

2. Try using a thesaurus. Krossbow recommends PowerThesaurus, and I see why.

3. Use LLMs and ask for new synonymous phrases. It works surprisingly well, especially if you compare and contrast different LLMs. (Check out my spreadsheet.) This is an especially good use for LLMs in SearchResearch tasks.

4. Check out Wiki-Guided Google Search as another way to look at Wikipedia.  

5. Don't forget about searching on YouTube. There's more there than you might expect.    

Keep searching.