Support : Publications : Chronolog Archives : May 2002

Business Questions Driving You Crazy? Turn to Gale Databases

Long time searchers know that Gale Group is a major contributor of general reference and business databases to Dialog. What you may not know is that Gale today provides more than 20 databases to Dialog services — databases that can help you answer virtually any general or business reference question. If you associate many of these databases with the names Predicasts, Information Access Company, and Responsive Database Services, all now part of Gale, you might be dating yourself as a searcher.

This article focuses on three key business periodical databases: Business & Industry™ (File 9/BIDB), Gale Group PROMT® (File 16/PTSP), and Gale Group Trade & Industry Database™ (File 148/INDY). Generally speaking, all three databases have articles on industries, companies, and products, including forecasts, trends and overviews; however, depending on your specific need, you may wish to search each in a different manner.

For a comprehensive search, one where you want to make sure that you are getting everything, a Dialog OneSearch or DataStar StarSearch of all three databases will scan over 1,400 unique active titles, of which more than 950 are fulltext. Because there is approximately 35% overlapping coverage among the three databases, we recommend using the Remove Duplicates/DEDUP command to eliminate the overlapping coverage. In each of these databases, 25-35% of the coverage is from titles published outside the United States, so you will also get the international perspective that is critical to many business searches today. Geographic indexing is available in all three databases to aid retrieval of stories relating to a particular region or country.

Searching all three databases together is an effective way to sweep all this content. Nevertheless, you may wish to search the files alone or in combination, depending on the search topic and strategy. Both Business & Industry and PROMT provide strong coverage of the global marketplace, with especially strong focus on companies and products, as well as on the technologies in the market that help create these products. While these databases offer hard numbers on market share and size, products, exports and imports, a great complementary database is TableBase™ (File 93/BTBL). TableBase records feature numeric data taken from business journals and other publications.

For more of a survey perspective, including business theory, business practices, or human resources issues Trade & Industry Database is recommended, along with its complement in these subject areas, Business and Management Practices (File 13). Figure 1 provides a comparison of coverage.