From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishdetective workdetective workefforts to discover information, find out how something works, answer a difficult question etc It took a lot of detective work to discover the cause of the problem. → detective
Examples from the Corpus
detective work• Brilliant detective work with a little luck tossed in to catch the savvy killer.• So it would take more years of dogged detective work by a handful of investigators to connect the dots.• Much slow and painstaking geological detective work is needed to make correlations such as these, but the results can be very valuable.• Finding the missing parts has been a lucky blending of good fortune and good detective work.• Drawn to the subject via a footnote, McKillop did some literary detective work to uncover Deeks's story.• It takes a bit of detective work to trace the symptom back to the cause.• In fact tying a pollution to its source can be a tricky piece of detective work.• It takes some detective work to trace the symptom back to its cause.• Late one night, they ran into Ken Creese, one of two detectives working the case. 