Focus on Curriculum:
Science Topics
When you think of science, what comes to mind? For some it may be a new treatment for a disease like diabetes, for others a drug that helps lower cholesterol or it may involve looking for a chemical and its trade name. Whatever your specific need, Dialog has databases that can answer your questions. Featured in this issue is a portion of the science information on Dialog. Because the science curriculum can be so broad, we'll focus on Science Topics—Biomedical, Chemistry and Pharmaceutical: content, training, search techniques and documentation so you can improve your searching expertise.

Focus on Curriculum: Science Topics (cont'd)

Characteristics of successful training
Training should not be an "inoculation." Rather than a one-shot injection of information, Dialog provides a continuing process that values, builds upon, and supports your learning, via informal and flexible means, as well as through more formal courses. Training professionals at Dialog consider the following principles:

• Offer many options for employing different learning styles and levels of development. Because there are significant differences in the ways adults learn, the most effective programs offer choices that allow participants to match their style with experience.
• Involve participants in learning following actual courses through practice and reinforcement.
• Appeal to participants at a variety of developmental stages. Participants attending classes differ with regard to their backgrounds, their years of experience and their levels of expertise with technology and with Dialog. These differences can drastically hinder or profoundly support learning. Thus, having a menu of different learning activities will increase the likelihood of a good rapport between the participants and the material they are trying to learn.

Each curriculum offers a variety of instructor-led courses, visual and auditory instructional aids, short and in-depth self-paced courses and step-by-step documentation to meet the varied needs of our customers. See the diagram for a visual representation of the Biomedical, Chemical and Pharma Science Topics Curriculum.

Training courses for the science researcher
Whether you need like to set aside time to take a Dialog course or fit one in when you have a few minutes, numerous free Web-based courses—both instructor-led and self-paced—are available for users at all levels of expertise.

Several instructor-led courses in October and November offer diverse content in biomedical, chemical and pharmaceutical subject matter and strategies for all levels of expertise. In addition, a series of self-paced pharma sessions using DialogWeb—Guided Search begins with the basics and carries through courses on tracking a drug through discovery, R&D, clinical trials, marketing and post-marketing surveillance. The "Key Pipeline Databases," another self-paced course, reinforces the instructor-led course and contains exercises to test your knowledge. These courses lend themselves to both auditory and visual learners.

Instructional aids reinforce your learning
Quick reference cards, quick guides, 2-page content sheets and more reinforce what you've learned in classes and self-paced modules. These concise instructional aids keep the information right at your fingertips.

The How Do I...? series with step-by-step instructions and sample searches covers the most-requested searches in biomedicine, pharma and chemistry. Examples are given for DialogClassic Web™ or DialogLink^® 5.

Focus on Content contains (1) five-minute overviews of databases such as EMBASE, CAB Abstracts and Food Science and Technology Abstracts, the free file for September; (2) Quick Comparison charts of the most comprehensive databases in particular subject areas; and (3) content sheets identifying databases and sources in more specific subjects such as biotechnology or medical devices.

Practice makes perfect
Nothing reinforces training like hands-on practice—creating search strategies and displaying results in a variety of databases.

Free ONTAP^® (ONline Training And Practice) databases let you practice your searches and hone your skills without incurring online charges. Databases and sample exercises are available in CA Search^® and CHEMSEARCH™ for chemistry, BIOSIS Previews^®, MEDLINE^®, SciSearch^®: A Cited Reference Science Database and EMBASE^® for biomedical and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts as well as the biomed files for pharma.

At Dialog we know that adult learners are not beginners, rather they are individuals who are in a particular stage of intellectual growth. Adult learners are mainly self-motivated; they bring with them a series of experiences, values, expectations and intentions as to what learning can accomplish; they have set patterns of learning brought about by a number of years of education, work or both. Providing a variety of experiences to facilitate the learning process for these learners is what Dialog training is all about.

Training

If you haven't taken a Dialog course recently, start the Fall off right by signing up for one of the many Dialog free classes. Here's what some of our customers have said about the courses they attended:

"Thank you very much for doing a superb presentation, and for sharing the PPT and the search transcript!! I find that reviewing the transcript is very helpful for viewing those examples."
—From Kevin

"These classes have been extremely helpful. I haven't used Dialog in ages and I forgot how great it is."
—From Priscilla

"Thanks for sending along the PowerPoint for Tuesday's seminar. It was very informative. I'm looking forward to Part 2! I appreciate the comprehensive list of resources that you've given us, as well as the list of upcoming classes. I'll be signing up."
—From Christine

Mark your calendar: Instructor-led Web-based courses
Dialog's live Web-based training, offered worldwide and in different languages, is designed to expand your search skills and knowledge of Dialog and DataStar, whatever your skill level — novice to power searcher. Each curriculum area is covered with a wide range of courses.

Here's a sampling of classes coming up:

• several business classes including an overview of American Business Directory (File 531), the free file of the month for October (October 7,8)
• patent classes including Patent Classification Searching in Derwent World Patents Index^® (File 351) (October 29), Analyzing Patent Data with Innography^® (October 1) and Searching Prior Art (November 12)
• basics classes for searching trademarks (October 15), engineering (October 29) and copyrights (December 3)
• and more

Featured science courses
Featured courses for the science researcher include:

• Overview of Pharmaceutical Pipeline Files (September 22) — an introduction to the databases used to monitor the drug approval process and strategies for planning and conducting pharmaceutical searches.
• Chemistry 101: Introduction to Chemistry Searching on Dialog (October 27) — highlights of the core chemistry files available on Dialog intended for novice searchers who have an interest in learning the basics of searching for chemistry information.
• Biomedical Search Basics (October 1) — overview of special indexing and features of the "big four" biomedical databases: EMBASE^®, MEDLINE^®, BIOSIS Previews^®, and SCISEARCH^®: A Cited Reference Science Database.
• Cited Reference Searching in the SciSearch, Social SciSearch and Arts & Humanities Search Files on Dialog (November 5) — an introduction to the Dialog databases that facilitate searching for cited-literature references.
• Strategies for Tracking Adverse Drug Effects (November 17) — techniques for creating a SearchSave or Alert strategy to track possible adverse effects of specific drugs.

These are only some of the courses we are offering in the next few months. Read detailed descriptions of all course content and register now.

Training outside North America
Check the training sites for the United Kingdom, France and Germany to see complete schedules of courses and email the instructors to register. In addition, register for any of the WebEx courses worldwide.

Search Techniques
Dialog Tip
Need to find synonyms for drug names? Dialog has several files that provide this information, and it's very easy to do. One place to start is CHEMSEARCH™ (File 398). EXPAND a drug name on the Chemical Name (NA=) field. For example, EXPAND NA=DIOSMIN. SELECT the appropriate E Reference number. Typically this appears as E3 and contains one record. TYPE the record in Format 9. Here you can browse the chemical names and synonyms and choose appropriate terms to search in the drug literature, drug pipeline or industry news databases.

Another source for synonyms is EMBASE^® (File 73). BEGIN 73; EXPAND TYLENOL. The expand display shows that Tylenol has one related term. EXPAND the appropriate E reference number (e.g., EXPAND E3). Here, we learn that the preferred term is paracetamol. This appears as R2. EXPAND R2, and we see that paracetamol has more than 100 related terms. View the list of the first 50 terms, and enter P to page down to the next 50 terms, and so on until you reach the end of the 110 terms.

DataStar Tip
One of the outstanding pharmaceutical databases is Pharmaprojects (PHAR on DataStar). Using DataStarWeb, you can refine your search in Pharmaprojects in many ways. For example, in Advanced Search, you can use the look-up lists to find and search a therapeutic class AND then limit that set by checking the boxes for new drugs only and/or for new chemical entities. One great thing with the look-up option for therapeutic classes — hierarchical order on the drop-down boxes on PHAR — is that if there is a "plus" symbol next to the name, you can expand the list for even greater search refinement. By clicking the plus sign next to Immunologicals, you can see the narrower terms.