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From the Editor

Researchers from industries dealing in energy and the environment, biotech, or scitech must look for information in a variety of areas. The broad array of information from Dialog offers answers whether you are looking for scientific, technical, regulatory, industry, or intellectual property information. You can find it all in one of Dialog's many content categories. This month's Chronolog highlights Dialog's wide-ranging content for the energy industry. Be sure to read "Finding the best sources across industries" and "Complementary sources for the energy industry" to learn more.

Stellar customer service from the Dialog Knowledge Center has consistently received high praise from our customers. The Knowledge Center with its experts who know the content and the fine points of Dialog searching is well known for answering your questions. But are you aware of the other ways in which they can help you with your search questions? Find out more in this issue.

Of course, you'll also want to review CAB ABSTRACTS, the featured file for February, cited-reference searching on ProQuest Dialog™, and learn about new apps that allow you to interact with Dialog and ProQuest — anytime, anywhere.

 

ProQuest Dialog Updates

Finding the best sources across industries

The corporate world needs a collection of sources it can count on to research facets of multi-disciplinary subjects. For example, companies developing energy technologies must address today's significant energy challenges, such as climate change, energy security, energy efficiency, sustainability, and water conservation, to name some.  

ProQuest Dialog's industry groupings — Energy & Environment, Engineering & Technology and Chemistry — provide the breadth of content for researchers in a given discipline. These industry groupings or "subject industries," often used to access a single database, also serve to broaden the "content pool" for researchers who need to find content from adjacent disciplines.

ProQuest Dialog also enables searchers to drill down in individual databases covering specific disciplines. Single databases offer greater detail for the specialist who recognizes and understands the characteristics of that database, such as the expert indexing and editorial input associated with each database. Users can search using additional limit options, such as content type, publication, date-range selection, classification and more, depending on the database, to refine the search to the particulars needed.

The subject industries

• demonstrate context and scope to users
• clearly show what is available within a given set of databases
• visually articulate the type of content likely to be found from these sources
• offer flexibility to customize subject areas to create multiple-disciplinary groupings that include the core databases in the discipline.

This solar energy industry example illustrates why finding the right content is so important. Databases in Energy & Environment and Engineering & Technology contain articles such as:

• "Sizing Energy Storage to Accommodate High Penetration of Variable Energy Resources" from Inspec^®
• "Atomic layer deposition for electrochemical energy generation and storage systems" from Ei Compendex^®
• "Power Sources" in Gale Group PROMT^®, describing the role batteries will continue to play in storage

These articles and others may offer important findings to further solutions for solar storage.

On legacy Dialog, patents from files like CLAIMS^®/U.S. Patents (File 340) may forecast innovations in the industry, for example these patents may address solar storage issues:

• SOLAR ENERGY COLLECTING SYSTEMS AND METHOD
• SYSTEM OF MOBILE SOLAR PANELS FOR CONSTRUCTION

Competition from other countries also poses problems and suggests opportunities. From business databases on ProQuest Dialog and legacy Dialog, these articles may suggest new directions:

• "Research and Markets Offers Report: Global Market for Solar PV Inverters" found in Business & Industry™ (File 9)
• "Solar Energy — Country's Job Creation Powerhouse" from Gale Group PROMT (File 16)
• "Simulation and experimental studies on natural lighting in enclosed lift lobbies of high-rise residential buildings by remote source solar lighting," also from Gale Group PROMT
• From The McGraw Hill Companies Publications Online (File 624) Platts' Renewable Energy Report and Inside Energy describe new regulations, trade agreements, tariffs and possible legislative incentives to U.S. companies, given China's emerging role in the global solar energy market.

Whether the industry is focused on one subject or needs multidisciplinary research, Dialog's comprehensive, industry-specific data collections provide information to help answer questions, solve problems, find opportunities and monitor the competition.

Check out the databases in each category (click the Databases tab), select those of interest and review the descriptions and ProSheets on ProQuest Dialog and the Bluesheets on legacy Dialog.

 

It's easy on ProQuest Dialog

Cited-reference searching comes to ProQuest Dialog
The Cited Reference field (REF) in SciSearch^®: a Cited Reference Science Database allows for flexibility in searching cited references. The REF field includes first author name, journal abbreviation, volume, issue, pages and publication year.  Enter as much as you know in a cited-reference search using either a quick query in the Basic Search form or the Advanced Search form. Searching on cited references can be as simple or complex as you wish, as you can see in the following examples.

The REF field contains this type of data on which you will base your search:

References
ABELSON, H. COMMUN ACM. 2000. 43. 74.
ADLEMAN, LM. SCIENCE. 1994. 266. 1021.

Topic: Find articles that cite a 2003 article by Eugenii Katz and I Willner in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, titled "A Biofuel Cell with Electrochemically Switchable and Tunable Power Output."  This article is in volume 125 so you can include the year and the volume in the search.

Search the REF field for the author, indexed as katz, e within five words of the journal abbreviation within five words of the publication year, within five years of the volume number. The search in the Basic Search form looks like this:

Or, enter your search in Row 1 in the Advanced Search form.

You can NOT out author self-cites easily in Basic Search simply by tacking on NOT AU(<last name, first initial>).

Or, in Advanced Search complete Row 2 of the form using the NOT connector and limiting to the AU Author field.

 

February Highlights

CAB ABSTRACTS — Your choice for agriculture and applied life sciences

Unlike many other databases, CAB ABSTRACTS ensures your users have access to all the important research, not just the research published in English-language journals. In fact, the research undertaken in China at this very moment could be the key to that final stage in your researchers' work!

CAB ABSTRACTS contains more than 6.3 million records dating from 1973 onward. It covers agriculture and applied life sciences literature, including more than 7,000 serial journals, books, and conference proceedings from over 116 countries in more than 50 languages. English language sources include approximately 4.6 million records, and non-English language sources number at 1.7 million records. Most non-English language abstracts are translated into English, so the user can easily assess how important the research is to his/her project. Key titles, where all the papers are likely to be relevant, are indexed cover-to-cover. For other titles, only those articles that fall within the scope of the database are selected. So, you can be sure each search retrieves only the results of interest to users, saving time and effort.

Searchable in the Energy & Environment industries on ProQuest Dialog (File 50 on legacy Dialog), CAB ABSTRACTS covers a wide range of subjects from agriculture to animal, plant, human and environmental sciences, and natural resources, including topics important in these areas such as biodiversity, human nutrition, microbiology, veterinary medicine, and environmental pollution.

CAB ABSTRACTS has a longstanding reputation for comprehensive, quality abstracting and indexing, and integrity of its data. Not only does the database cover the core literature but also "gray" literature from around the world, including:

Annual reports Books/book chapter Bulletin Conference proceedings Discussion papers Field notes Discussion papers

Field notes General reports Handbooks Monographs Newsletters Technical information Theses

Subject classification and indexing is completed by subject experts. The CAB Thesaurus used for indexing and controlled vocabulary and CABICODES enable you to easily refine the search. Since 2010, more than 100,000 full-text records have been added to the database. Use RT=fulltext in legacy Dialog to identify records containing links to the full text. The link displays in Formats 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9.

Review the Overview of CAB ABSTRACTS to learn more about the database. Sign up for the Webinar by a CAB Abstracts expert.

 

Call on the experts

You know when you call Dialog you can count on the Knowledge Center experts to help you get the answer you need. Whether it's assistance in finding the right database to search, tweaking a strategy to retrieve targeted results or determining which product to use, experienced Information Consultants can help. Here's why.

All members of the Knowledge Center are dedicated professionals with a passion for helping people. They all realize that accurate and timely information is vital. With years of experience searching Dialog products on top of backgrounds as attorneys, PhD research scientists, engineering and consulting librarians and business experts with masters' degrees in management and expertise in competitive intelligence, our Information Consultants have both the Dialog expertise and the subject knowledge to answer your queries. They are our first line of support for you, our customers.

But, that's not their only responsibility in helping customers. Our Knowledge Center experts also:

• Instruct online training sessions on ProQuest Dialog and legacy Dialog. See Training for more details on specific sessions. Attend a live session or listen to a free recorded session.
• Create materials, including patent workbooks, the How Do I... series and Search Solutions, among others.
• Answer FAQs and identify hot topics in the new Support Center.

Our experienced Information Consultants provide expert assistance in conducting Pharmaceutical and Biomedical, Engineering and Technology, Intellectual Property, and Business and Market research. When you have a question, simply email or call the Knowledge Center at 800 334 2564 (outside North America.at 00 800 333 42564).

 

Infotrieve's Mobile Library

From your desktop, laptop and iPad™, easily and securely access Infotrieve's Mobile Library, a cloud-based copyright-compliant content management and document-delivery system, anywhere at any time. Mobile Library is an easy-to-use gateway to Dialog's licensed, pay-per-view content. Infotrieve has more than 50 million citations aggregated from partnerships with libraries and publishers around the globe, including the Canadian National Science Library Collection and its unique STM Library™ of managed print collections.

 

ebrary for corporations and government

E-books have become so popular that libraries cannot fill the demand. Search, browse, and preview all of the e-books and other authoritative materials that ebrary offers from leading publishers for corporations and government. Review a listing of titles by industry.

For example, in the solar energy industry, such titles as Solar Energy Fundamentals and Modeling Techniques: Atmosphere, Environment, Climate Change and Renewable Energy; Selling Solar: The Diffusion of Renewable Energy in Emerging Markets or Advances in Solar Power  provide complementary sources for the research publications from Dialog. Search by title or industry. View a Table of Contents for each e-book, and sample pages from its chapters. Request a trial to try ebrary's full functionality and review titles in full text.

 

Discover: Scitech Content Updates

Complementary sources for the energy industry

The ProQuest family of databases is ideal for an industry like energy, which covers so many areas such as oil, gas, mining, biofuels, conservation and green energy, as well as international news and data.

• ABI/Inform includes over 450 current full-text titles specifically targeted to inform business decision making and research in the energy market, including news, law and data pertinent to industry analysis and trends, risk assessment and forecasting.  Content includes key scholarly titles from publishers including Springer, Emerald and Cambridge University Press, along with over 100 highly relevant trade journals from BNP Media, Energy Intelligence Group, Hart Energy Publishing and others.
• 100 additional full-text titles broadly related to energy are available through ProQuest Central, and Business Monitor International Quarterly provides power reports for over 30 countries.
• ProQuest Science and Technology Collections include ProQuest Illustrata, deep indexing, tables and figures and vast content, such as The Energy Journal, Energy Weekly News and many more.

 

Validate: Intellectual Property Content Updates

Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI) value add

In 2011 approximately 3.3 million patents were loaded into Derwent World Patents Index^® DWPI^SM, with 1.5 million of these being new records (basics) in the file. This was a 10.5% increase from the previous year. Processing this volume of data is a huge task, particularly as the original patent data can contain errors in the bibliographic data, which could impact the accuracy in searching.

At Thomson Reuters, the DWPI production teams use both programmatic rules and human endeavor to identify and correct as many of these mistakes as possible, to ensure the accuracy of key value add elements such as the DWPI patent family and Patent Assignee codes, and also improve searching through the addition of International Patent Classification (IPC) codes. Correcting errors in the original patent content is a key aspect of the DWPI value add, providing searchers with the most comprehensive and accurate patent content in one file — the Derwent World Patents Index.

Each week data from various patent offices is loaded (receipted) into the DWPI production system and conversion/validation programs are run to standardize all of the bibliographic data fields into a standard DWPI format. Through this initial processing step, records with errors or missing data are identified and are routed to experts in the production team to be manually corrected. Typical errors include incorrect priority or application numbers, or wrong patent assignee names, or missing data such as the IPCs.

In addition to these error corrections, the assignee names are checked against our internal Patentee dictionary, and when a match is found, the relevant DWPI Assignee Code is applied. The dictionary is updated for any names that don't match a name already in the dictionary, and a new DWPI Assignee code is created and applied.

The chart at the right shows the volume of corrections made by the editorial team in 2011, across a range of bibliographic fields — IPC, inventor names, priority numbers/dates, PCT and Divisional filings details.

Corrections for selected bibliographic fields
Corrections to the priority data are particularly important as this improves the accuracy of the DWPI patent family, since this is a key field used to create the patent family (bringing together patents relating to the same invention).

The example to the right shows an incorrect priority number on a UK Patent Application. It was incorrectly published with a Swiss Priority CH 1020257029. The priority country should have been China. This was corrected in the DWPI record by the editorial team and the application joined the correct family.

 

Learn about ProQuest

ebrary launches mobile app

To meet researchers' evolving needs, ebrary^®, a leading provider of e-books and research technology, has launched a new app for the iPad^®, iPhone^®, and iPod touch^®. If you haven't used ebrary yet, now it's easier and more convenient than ever.

Available on the App Store^SM, the free new app gives researchers an optimized way to experience authoritative content, both online and offline, from multiple sources. With ebrary's new app, researchers can access content on the ebrary platform, including e-books their librarians acquire from leading publishers and documents uploaded and integrated by librarians with DASH!™ (Data Sharing, Fast). Additionally, users can import their own personal research outside of the ebrary platform through the app. And to make it easier to use ebrary with or without the app, ebrary researchers can sign-in with their Facebook usernames and passwords.

Key features and benefits of ebrary's new mobile app include:

• Freely available with any ebrary product, offering a growing selection of more than 70,000 e-books
• Online and offline reading
• Seamless downloading of full titles
• Simple and advanced search
• Multiple navigation controls
• Table of contents with relevancy rankings
• Early check-in of ebrary's e-books
• Copy and paste with automatic citation for offline documents
• User-configurable download size warnings
• Import and use documents from other sources
• Available in English and Spanish

Note: To download e-books, you'll need an Adobe ID. If you don't have one, you may create one for free.