Resource Review: Venn Diagram Searching

by guest author Dan Brackmann

If you’ve ever wanted to see which search term wasn’t working or how your search terms were interacting, HeinOnline’s Venn diagram searching may be just the thing you wanted.  To perform a Venn diagram search, select HeinOnline’s “Advanced Search” option, select “Venn Diagram Search” on the right-side of the search page, and enter the search terms.

HeinOnline's search bar showing advanced search on the bottom and the Venn Diagram search button to the right.

The results display as a Venn diagram showing how the various terms intersect with the number of results shown by the circle’s sizes.  The actual search results are displayed to the right.

Search results for "access to justice" AND "immigrant" AND "critical race theory" displaying a Venn diagram that shows the different search phrases and how they intersect. The results are listed on the right.

Additionally, you can hover over any part of the diagram and the right-side will change to reflect that set’s search results. You can then click the part of the diagram to “lock-in” that particular subset of results.

Search results for "access to justice" AND "immigrant" AND "critical race theory" displaying a Venn diagram that shows the different search phrases and how they intersect. The intersection of "immigrant" and "access to justice" has been selected and those results are displayed on the right.

The Venn diagram is quite useful for identifying unproductive terms as well as visualizing how the terms are interacting.   For more information, see Hein’s video at: https://youtu.be/muxHaj9U14c.