Converse to selection by sorting, one can incrementally sort by repeated selection. Abstractly, selection only yields a single element, the "k"th element. However, practical selection algorithms frequently involve partial sorting, or can be modified to do so. Selecting by partial sorting naturally does so, sorting the elements up to "k", and selecting by partitioning also sorts some elements: the pivots are sorted to the correct positions, with the "k"th element being the final pivot, and the elements between the pivots have values between the pivot values. The difference between partition-based selection and partition-based sorting, as in quickselect versus quicksort, is that in selection one recurses on only one side of each pivot, sorting only the pivots (an average of log("n") pivots are used), rather than recursing on both sides of the pivot.