[Air-L] Seeking solutions to small text search mystery

Craig Scott crscott at rutgers.edu
Mon Jan 10 12:24:51 PST 2011


 

Colleagues, a graduate student and I could use your help solving a mystery
related to computerized text searching/coding of online documents.  We are
examining documents (all saved as .pdf files) using the advanced search tool
in Adobe Reader. While that tool generally works fine, it does not seem to
recognize certain fairly standard statistical/mathematical symbols (such as
the p used in statistical significance testing and symbols such as <, >, or
=) in numerous documents.  This is true even when we directly cut and paste
the symbol in question into the search tool (surprisingly, it still does not
recognize that symbol in the document). The problem occurs only with certain
sources (such as all articles from certain journals), even when the rest of
the article is fully searchable. This is happening with very recent
documents published after 2000 (we are not searching older ones). We suspect
these symbols might be part of some equation editor or specially formatted
text, but we don't know.

Has anyone else encountered and solved a similar problem? Do you have any
other suggestions on a search tool for .pdf documents that might be
superior? We would also welcome any suggestions on other ways to save these
documents and search them that would address this (I think we could do
optical character recognition, but fear that may create other accuracy
problems). Thanks for any suggestions/thoughts you have related to helping
us solve this frustrating little mystery.

Craig 

Craig R. Scott, Ph.D., 

   Associate Professor, Department of Communication &

   Director, Ph.D. Program

School of Communication & Information

Rutgers University

4 Huntington Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Voice: 732-932-7500 x8142; Fax: 732-932-3756

Office in 201 DeWitt (185 College Avenue)

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