Running search term reports can help lay the foundation for identifying key documents, helping to determine your review population, or prepare for depositions and trial. DISCO's search term reports provide users with the ability to run search terms against all documents or discrete populations of documents within a database, create multiple search term reports, and see unique hits on each term. With search term reports, you can easily add terms using search builder, search history, any saved search, or by loading the terms from a text file.
To access search term reports, in the main menu, click Search Term Reports.
If no reports currently exist, the screen will appear as seen below.
Click Create a Search Term Report, enter a name for the new report, and then click Create.
Once your report has been created, you will see the screen below.
Before you add your search terms, you may want to set the scope of your report. Report scope refers to the corpus of documents you will be searching. You can choose to search all documents (default), all documents within a folder, or all documents with a specific tag. In addition, you can can click in the search bar and use search builder, search history, or a saved search to set your scope.
Once you have selected your report scope, DISCO will show you the number of documents within the scope.
Similar to setting the report scope, you can start adding your search terms by either typing them in the search bar or using DISCO's search tools. Once you have entered your search term, DISCO will show you the number of hits that term returns. Note that the number of hits displayed in the search bar will reflect the number of hits for that term across the whole database, not just for the selected scope.
To add the term to your report, click the plus sign. You can continue to create and add search terms as needed.
In addition to being able to add search terms using the search bar, DISCO allows users to upload a list of terms from a text file. To start, click the Upload search term list button located to the right of the plus sign.
DISCO provides you with the option to either drag and drop the text file into the browser window or click browse to navigate to the text file and upload it.
If there are any errors in your search syntax, DISCO will display a warning and prompt you to resolve the error.
If you uploaded any search terms from a text file that contain syntax errors, DISCO will flag those terms in your report.
To correct an error in your report or modify an existing search term, hover over the term and a pencil icon will appear to the right.
Click in the cell and modify the term as needed. You will know if you have successfully corrected your syntax error when the term no longer appears in red.
To see updated counts, click Calculate Results and DISCO will calculate the number of documents, unique hits, and cumulative counts across three groups:
- The documents within your scope
- The documents and their family members
- Families (as a unit) plus loose files
In addition to providing useful statistics on a search term level, DISCO supplies you with cumulative totals for all three groups.
Here is a detailed summary of each of the nine results DISCO provides for each search term:
- Documents
- Count: The number of documents matching the search term
- Unique: The number of documents matching the search term that match no other term in the report
- Cum.: The number of documents matching the search term or any of the higher ranked search terms
- Documents with family members
- Count: The number of documents matching the search term plus family members of those documents
- Unique: The number of documents matching the search term that match no other term in the report plus family members of those documents, but excluding documents matching any of the other search terms or their families
- Cum.: The number of documents matching the search term or any of the higher ranked search terms plus family members of those documents
- Families and loose documents
- Count: The number of families containing at least one document matching the search term, plus the number of loose documents matching the term
- Unique: The number of families containing at least one document matching the search term, plus the number of loose documents matching the term, but excluding families and loose documents that match any of the other search terms
- Cum.: The number of families containing at least one document matching the search term or any higher ranked search terms, plus the number of loose documents matching the term
The above hit count descriptions can be easily be accessed within DISCO by clicking the i to the right of SEARCH TERMS.
You can recalculate the search term report results whenever you add a new term, modify an existing term, rearrange the order of your terms, or deselect certain terms from being included in your report.
For example, you can move the term "off-schedule" from search term number 1 to number 3. When you hover over the term, two lines of dots will appear to the left of the checkbox. Grab the line and drag and drop it above search term number 4. In addition, if you do not want include the term "off-schedule" in your calculations, but do not want to remove it completely from your report, you can deselect the checkbox to deactivate the search. Removal of the check will exclude the term from being included in the calculations and from any exported version of the search term report.
Reordering and deactivating search terms allows you to continuously recalculate results, gaining valuable insight into the impact of each individual search term and the total results.
DISCO gives you the power to quickly and easily modify search terms and recalculate counts, along with the ability to preview your search results. Once DISCO has calculated your results, certain results' numbers will be underlined; these are hyperlinks that can be used to create searches using your selected syntax.
For example, if you want to see the search results for only the unique documents for the term agreement*, click the 15 in the UNIQUE column and DISCO will run that search. The syntax of the search will be displayed in the search bar on the home page and the results will appear in the list view.
In addition to being able to run searches on the term level, you can run searches on the cumulative documents total and the cumulative documents with family total. Click the hyperlink and DISCO will bring up your syntax and results.
If you need to create a report of your search term results, click the Download Report button to download it in PDF or Excel format.
The PDF version is a formatted report that includes all calculations performed for all active search terms. The downloaded report will include the name of the database being searched, the person who last calculated the report, and the date and time the downloaded reported was created.
The Excel version will be a custom report based on DISCO's calculations. Again, DISCO will export all results for all active searches.
If you want to modify a particular search term report without impacting the original, or if you want to apply the same set of search terms to a different set of documents (scope), click the Copy this report icon to copy the existing report.
DISCO will create a new search term report that copies the original report’s name, scope, and all active and inactive search terms, all of which can be easily updated.
Finally, to access the search term reports management screen, click the Search Term Reports hyperlink.
On the search term reports management screen you will find cards displaying helpful information about each search term report created, including scope, date, and time last calculated along with total counts. From this screen you can open and modify a report, export the results to PDF or Excel, or delete.
This feature is available in all databases created on or after September 26, 2017.