Drill Down, Baby, Drill Down …

“The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.” -- Casey Stengel (American Baseball Player and Manager, 1891-1975)

Managers love to talk about “drilling down” into the data.  Here’s an example of applying that concept to Google® Scholar.

Pretend that we want to know what technologies Exxonmobil has been pursuing.  Entering the simple search string Exxonmobil yields around 44,000 hits.

But we are primarily interested in recent Exxonmobil activity.  We drill down by clicking the Advanced Scholar Search button.

A search form pops up which allows us to restrict the search to items no older than 2011.

The result is a list with around 6,000 results.  But we want to focus on Exxonmobil’s recent desulfurization activities.  So we drill down further.

Back at the Advanced Scholar Search form, we add the following key words …

Sulfur desulfurization biodesulfurization electrodesulfurization

Now we’re down to about 1,000 on the hit list.  We are cooking, as my grandmother used to say, with gas.

Drill down, baby!