The following is excerpted from a handout provided at the June 1998 IRE National Conference in New Orleans.
Check out experts directories on the Web. You know those "Guide to the Faculty Experts at Wahoo University" books your local institutions of higher learning or favorite think tanks send out annually? Chances are good that they're also available on the Web. These directories typically offer experts' credentials in excruciating detail, as well as contact information. Who needs big collections of paper directories?
Online directories are often featured prominently on an organization's Web site. Sometimes they're grouped together with other information like press releases.
Repositories of experts come in many different forms. Think creatively: When you're looking for experts, Amazon.com isn't a place to buy books, it's a database of over a million experts. Same goes for the Library of Congress. The New York Times Book Review is not only a great place to check out an author's credibility but also a good place to search for experts. It's free and contains over 50,000 reviews going back to 1980.
Other databases of experts masquerading as something else: AskEric (www.askeric.org), the Educational Resources Information Center, and the National Library of Medicine (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/freemedl.html), a database of nine million references to articles in 4,000 medical journals.
Look for experts in newsgroup and listserv postings, but be cautious. These are wild and woolly places to be searching for experts and can become black holes into which you valuable time. If you do find someone you think is an expert, it can be difficult to gauge his credibility.
An intelligent, targeted search can turn up some gems. To foster productive searching in DejaNews (www.dejanews.com), the premier newsgroup search engine that contains 100 million postings going back to March 1995, go to the Search Language Help page (www.dejanews.com/help/help_lang.shtm), print it and keep it next to you. Always use the Power Search option.
There are far fewer options for searching electronic mailing lists, but a good first step is Reference.COM (www.reference.com), an archives of three months' worth of postings to 8,000 mailing lists (of an estimated 100,000+). You can store queries and run them automatically every day if you want.
Try the Directory of Scholarly and Professional E-Conferences (www.n2h2.com/KOVACS/). It's a good source for 4,000 mostly high-quality mailing lists and newsgroups on topics of interest to scholars and professionals, divided into more than 50 subjects.
Use traditional search engines efficiently. AltaVista (www.altavista.digital.com) supports proximity searching, truncation and all sorts of sophisticated search capabilities that makes it ideal for finding experts. It can limit searching to URLs with certain words in them or to particular domains, but only if you click on "Advanced" and put your search into the "Boolean expression" box. You can do somewhat complicated - but effective - searches like this one: (expert or author* or research* or professor) near astron* and (url:mit or url:princeton or url:stanford).
You can't ignore HotBot (www.hotbot.com) because of the huge size of its database.
Beaucoup! (www.beaucoup.com) has more than 1,000 engines, directories and indices listed, divided into 20 categories. Search.com (www.search.com) gives you 100 different ways to search the Web, divided into 14 different categories. The Mining Co. (www.miningco.com) is a search engine but also has 500 interest areas, moderated by expert guides, on everything from the aviation industry to zines.
Check your expert's credibility. If you found your expert at a reputable university or think tank, you're on pretty firm ground. Someone else checked out his credentials before he got there.
Find out who else has quoted your expert because of her expertise. Run her name through a commercial online service such as Lexis/Nexis. Many reputable publications have free searchable archives. For links to free archives, see News Hunt (www.newshunt.com). Run your expert's name through several search engines. Try Northern Light (www.nlsearch.com), which has a "Special Collection" of 3,400 high quality publications. Don't forget to check your expert out in DejaNews for indications of her expertise and/or psychoses. For all you know, she may be a frequent poster in alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless or alt.impeach.clinton.
When using experts found in expert witness directories, like ExpertPages.com, remember that these people are part of the testimony-for-hire industry. That doesn't mean that they aren't experts, but you really want to check out their reputations. James Derk in his excellent story on experts ("Charlatans or Authorities?", Editor and Publisher, June 14, 1997) quotes ProfNet's Dan Forbush as saying, "Ultimately it's up to the journalists to decide the qualifications of the expert."
Kitty Bennett can be reached by e-mail at bennett@sptimes.com.