A computer will not miraculously produce answers to every question. The information explosion has caused an astonishing growth in the number of data bases available. Most of these data bases are produced independently by various commercial concerns, resulting in differences in cost, quality and style of indexing. The costs of online searching indude telecommunication fees, data base royalties, and citation charges, all of which vary greatly and can be quite high. Most users think these costs justified when they consider the alternative a manual search through years of printed indexes.
Manual searches are time consuming, but because most research.
When you scan article titles listed under the most appropriate subject heading, you automatically reject titles that seem to be unrelated to the research topic. A computerized search is the result of a rapid sorting of the documents to find those with common character strings. After reading these terms and combining them in the manner instructed, the computer produces a list that can be displayed, printed or downloaded onto a disk. The computer does not think at least not yet. Whatever the computer reads it interprets literally.