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From the Editor

The environment is quite the multi-disciplinary, global hot topic as of late, and this issue of The Chronolog highlights content on Dialog and ProQuest™ services that will let you search deep and broad on the issues. Find out which databases covering the environment to search on Dialog services, as well as complementary sources from ProQuest. One such file you’ll want to learn more about is GeoRef — the featured file of the month.

Also in this issue, see how you can get involved in conversations with the Dialog and ProQuest user community with the help of social media, keep up-to-date on reloads in the biomed files, and more.

 

ProQuest Dialog Updates

Explore environmental issues with Dialog

Oil spills, nuclear waste, habitat protection — some of the hottest topics today encompass the environment
and also cross over into business. You can integrate essential science and high-technology data with business and regulatory intelligence using Dialog resources. Need to develop environmentally friendly processes or products? Want to confirm how your building and architectural plans stack up against “green” standards? Trying to stay abreast of global and local environmental laws and regulations? Looking for chemical toxicity or safety data?  Dialog is your starting point to get answers to these questions and many others.

Whether you are a scientist studying water pollution, a regulator who sets industrial standards, a company providing waste management services, or an attorney investigating legal issues of climate change, Dialog, through its services, provides the most comprehensive, diverse collection of indexed technical literature, regulatory data and business information available online.

Technical databases

• Check environmental industry databases on ProQuest Dialog, including BIOSIS Previews^® and PASCAL, for sources like Environmental Biology, Environmental International, Environmental Toxicology or Environmental Science and Pollution Research International.
• You’ll find production processes and environmental issues covered in-depth in publications such as European Environment & Packaging Law, Bioresource Technology and Converting Today.
• Search British Library Inside Conferences to find papers given at symposia, meetings and conferences, such as Conference on Sustainable Energy, or collected in conference proceedings, including: Environmental Law and Management, Biodiversity and Climate Change: some emerging legal issues; and Environmental Engineering and Management Journal.

Business and regulatory data

Another group of ProQuest Dialog and legacy Dialog databases contains environmental regulations and standards for specific industries:

• chemicals, plastics and energy (RAPRA Polymer Library)
• packaging, paper, printing and publishing, imaging and nonwovens (PIRABASE and Paperbase)
• environment from a business and industry perspective (Gale Group PROMT^®)
• climate change and coal-powered output, strategies for strengthening environmental health in Asia, and EPA actions on power plant emissions (Asia Pulse, the American Chemical Society and Europolitics).

 

It's easy on ProQuest Dialog

Advantage — power searchers (with Command Line Search)

Information professionals familiar with the power of Dialog and DataStar command language are more likely to navigate to Command Line Search in ProQuest Dialog where they can develop strategies, build sets, combine concepts, and use proximity connectors and date-range limiters.
Such power searchers can find lists of field codes and look up terms like authors, classification codes, publication titles and subject terms.

They preview result counts to analyze results and then combine concepts.

The key to Command Line Search is an understanding of proximity connectors like the ones provided on this handy chart to help power searchers find the right ProQuest Dialog connector.

Dialog	DataStar	Definition	Convert to ProQuest Dialog
AND	AND	Narrow	AND
OR	OR	Broaden	OR
NOT	NOT	Exclude	NOT
WITH (W)	ADJ	Next to each other in exact order	PRE/0 P/0
NEAR (N)	—	Next to each other in any order	NEAR/0 N/0
(#W)	—	Within # words in exact order	PRE/# P/#
(#N)	—	Within # words in any order	NEAR/# N/#
(5N)	NEAR	Within 5 words but not necessarily in the same order	NEAR/5 N/5
(5W)	NEXT	Within 5 words in the same order	PRE/5 P/5
(L)	WITH	Same descriptor	LNK

The example to the right uses ProQuest Dialog connectors P/0 and N/# (where # is a number) to find (green or sustainable) next to chemistry within five words of industrial.

 

March Highlights

GeoRef: The geosciences authority

If you are looking for comprehensive, authoritative geology and geophysics information, you’ve come to the right place. Established by the American Geosciences Institute (AGI) in 1966, GeoRef on ProQuest Dialog (File 89 on legacy Dialog) is the source to use. Growing by more than 100,000 references a year, the database contains worldwide technical geology and geophysics literature from more than 3.3 million references in 3,500 journal articles, as well as books, maps, conference papers, reports, theses and dissertations. Updated weekly (GeoRef In-Process — monthly), GeoRef’s comprehensive content includes major areas ranging from geochemistry and geophysics to mining, mineralogy, and environmental geology and much more.

With the growth of the environmental sciences, inclusion of environmental topics has increased dramatically in recent years.

Examples: climate change, ecology, geologic hazards-earthquakes, floods, land subsidence, landslides, debris flows, tsunamis, volcanoes, groundwater pollution conservation, land use, pollution of surface water (seldom covered) reclamation

The GeoRef database covers the geology of North America from 1669 to the present, and the geology of the rest of the world from 1933 forward.

About 40% of the indexed publications originate in the United States and the remainder from outside the United States. Publications of international organizations represent about 7% of the file.

Special features
GeoRef uses specialized indexing including a thesaurus and subject categories. A key feature of the file is geographic coordinates that let you search for records relating to an area within a quadrangle, bounded by latitude and longitude.

ProQuest Deep Indexing in the Earth Sciences Collection supplements GeoRef with access to millions of indexed charts, figures, graphs, maps, photographs, and tables from scholarly research and technical literature. Contact your account representative for more information on Deep Indexing and the ProQuest Earth Sciences Collection.

Learn more about GeoRef in the Overview. Check the ProQuest Dialog ProSheet and the Dialog Bluesheet. Sign up for a GeoRef Webinar on March 20.

 

Tweet, Comment, Like, Post, Update, Share, Join . . . in other words, Build Community

Social media and networking have experienced tremendous growth in the last few years:

• Facebook added over 200 million users in less than one year
• If Facebook were a country, it would have the world’s third largest population
• More than 1.5 million pieces of content (e.g., web links, news stories, blog posts, photos, notes) are shared on Facebook daily
• There are more than 2 million blogs; 54 percent of these bloggers post or tweet daily
• Two to three new Twitter accounts are activated every second
• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

Source: Pew Research Center (2010)

Social media is everywhere, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Social networks bring people together in a central location to talk, share ideas, activities and interests across political, economic, and geographic borders. It is not a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way people communicate.

Connect with our social media
Dialog has its own social media channels to form communities where Dialog users who share similar interests can talk together and share ideas. Our social media also allows us to communicate what’s happening at Dialog and ProQuest, as well as in scitech, biomedical, and intellectual property industries.

We offer a variety of social media sites, and you’ll find icons at the top of all web pages on the Dialog website link to our Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn channels.

Join one or more of Dialog and ProQuest’s social media. The more you contribute the more you will gain from your connections. Start a discussion, ask questions, suggest topics, provide answers and comments, establish new relationships with others in these groups and get the most from your social media contacts.

• Enter Dialog^® Professional Group, a new LinkedIn Group page. Keep in touch with colleagues and news at Dialog and ProQuest.
• Join Dialog LLC Twitter to stay in touch with Dialog.
• Make Dialog LLC Facebook one of your group pages on Facebook.
• Enroll in ProQuest Ning Discover More Corps and connect with your colleagues. Learn about Quantum² webinars and other activities.

Start now and make Dialog part of your community!

 

ProQuest Environmental sources complement ProQuest Dialog

Researchers can access approximately 250 titles with a specific focus on the environment and sustainability (including 100 scholarly journals with ongoing full text) through ProQuest Environmental Science Collection.

The collection features over 1,600 periodicals in total, including many scientific journals and periodicals covering related subject areas. This database comprises three core elements to provide a unique solution for environmental scientists: full-text journals, tables and figures and bibliographic abstracts. These titles are also available as part of ProQuest Central.

More than 80 titles in ABI Inform relate to the environment and sustainability, including general environmental content and publications that inform environmentally sustainable business decisions. These include more than 30 scholarly journals with ongoing full text such as Environment (Heldref), Environment and Development Economics (Cambridge University Press) and Environmental Science and Pollution Research International (Springer).

When you access the ProQuest subject thesaurus from the Advanced Search Page, you’ll find articles and reports relevant to a subject, such as “sustainable development” (20,000+ results), that can be further filtered using fields such as source type and location.

The ProQuest Environmental Science Journals contains:

• Key trade publications: The Business of Global Warming, Enviromation, Global Warming Focus and many more
• Key scholarly journals: Environment and Development Economics, Environmental Science & Technology, Environmental Health Perspectives, Environmental Ethics and others
• Non-periodical content highlights: Reports and working papers from Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, including OECD Environment Working Papers  

For more information on ProQuest sources, contact your account representative.

 

Discover: Scitech Content Updates

Biomedical annual reloads completed

• MEDLINE^® has been reloaded with the 2012 MeSH^® by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on both legacy Dialog and ProQuest Dialog. This year 454 descriptors were added; 42 were changed and 15 were deleted. See the list at the NLM. The MeSH descriptors in all records now match the new MeSH thesaurus.
  
  In contrast to new terms that are usually added and used only from the date loaded forward, changed or deleted headings are normally applied to the whole database during the NLM’s year-end processing. As a result, you may need to adjust your Alerts and Saved Searches to take into account the changes introduced in the 2012 MeSH^®. For complete details of all changes, read the National Library of Medicine’s comprehensive article, “MEDLINE Data Changes — 2012.” Or, consult “What’s New for 2012 MeSH” for an overview of new, changed and deleted MeSH for 2012.

• ToxFile^® has also been reloaded with the 2012 MeSH on both ProQuest Dialog and legacy Dialog.

• Embase^® on ProQuest Dialog has been reloaded with the new 2012 Emtree thesaurus. You can also download a list of terms added to Emtree 2012 thesaurus. Updates to the database, as well as Alerts, were suspended during the reload from February 28 to March 4 inclusive. These Alerts were delivered following the reload on March 5.

 

“Versioned” citations on MEDLINE

“Versioning” is a model of publishing whereby publishers release multiple versions of the same article, sometimes in quick succession and sometimes almost as soon as the original article has been published. To associate versioned articles with each other, the NLM is now creating an individual citation for each article’s version and assigning the same accession number to each one with a variable version ID (e.g., 12345678v2, 12345678v3, 12345678v4, etc.) Note the first in a series of versions has no trailing ‘v1’.

The Version ID supplied by the publisher will identify the specific version. The NLM does not expect many journals will publish versions, so the incidence of versioned citations is expected to be small. As of February 2012, there are only two citations in MEDLINE with version IDs:  20029611 has two versions and 20029614 has 10 versions. They are both from the journal PLoS Currents.

ProQuest Dialog example	Legacy Dialog example (Files 154/155)
an(20029614V10) returns version 10	SELECT AA=20029614V10	returns version 10 (of 10 records)
an(20029614*) returns the ten records	SELECT AA=20029614?	returns all 10 records
an(20029614) returns version 1	SELECT AA=20029614	returns version 1

 

New thesaurus implemented with Petroleum Abstracts reload

Petroleum Abstracts (TULSA) has been reloaded on ProQuest Dialog. The new thesaurus is now applied to the entire database. Two other enhancements include:

• Patent data: now appears in the Patent field with existing publication data, inventor names and assignees
• Publication title: where a record refers to a book, the title of the book appears in the Title field and the Publication title field.

 

Validate: Intellectual Property Content Updates

It’s here: Japanese legal status in INPADOC

Patent researchers, here’s what you’ve been waiting for: Japanese legal status is now available in INPADOC/Family and Legal Status (File 345) on Dialog. Legal status events for Japanese patents and utility models dating back to the beginning of April 2011 were initiated in week 201204. Some examples of events to be included are decisions to grant, fee payments, and request for licenses.

This sample record illustrates this new content.

 

Your competitors are using DWPI. Why aren’t you?

The Derwent World Patents Index^® (DWPI^SM) (File 351/352, 350) is the world’s most trusted source of patent information, expertly indexed and featuring enhanced titles and comprehensive abstracts. With DWPI, you will improve your ability to find innovations you would otherwise miss and quickly determine the novelty of an invention. DWPI empowers you to uncover patent information you can rely on to make decisions with confidence.

Why are your competitors using DWPI?

1. Content in English regardless of the language of the original record — in particular the comprehensive coverage of Asian authorities
2. Coverage of 47 worldwide patent authorities including both the major and emerging centers of innovation
3. Comprehensive patent family including non-convention equivalents, with one record per invention
4. Error corrections made to original data through human expertise improving precision and recall of searching in the file
5. Editorially-enhanced titles and abstracts consistently summarizing the novelty, uses and advantage of the invention allowing quick scanning
6. Patent Assignee codes presenting a standard way to represent companies and their subsidiaries, and deal with spelling mistakes
7. Unique indexing system (manual codes) that categorizes inventions and enables consistent retrieval across all the authorities covered in DWPI
8. Used and trusted by 36 patent offices worldwide. Customers drafting a patent can tailor their application using DWPI to find the patents that the examiner will consider during the examination process

 

Learn about ProQuest

RefWorks Write-N-Cite plays nicely with both Windows and MAC

Researchers count on Write-N-Cite, the popular citation tool that is part of the RefWorks^® line of online research organization tools. Now a major enhancement makes Write-N-Cite available in both Windows^® and Mac environments. As a result, it can run on Word for Windows 2007 and 2010 as well as Word for Mac 2008 and 2011. Both platforms provide the same features, and sharing documents between computers is as easy as opening a file and leveraging the strengths of a Cloud-based service for all users.

The new release improves everything from formatting enhancements to new features. Citations now format automatically while a user works, and styles are updated on demand without any manual formatting; no need to wait until a paper is finished to see the citations. Plus, easy footnote management means not worrying about the details of styles like MLA, Chicago or more than 1,600 other output styles. Learn more about the advantages of Write-N-Cite and other recent enhancements to RefWorks, including automatic citations formatting and customization options.