Support : Publications : Chronolog Archives : Special Edition - March 2004

Profound Changes are Here

On March 1 Dialog launches a brand new Dialog Profound and Dialog NewsRoom. Current subscribers will be impressed with its streamlined, intuitive interface and expanded business content. But the changes are more than skin deep. Beneath the elegant interface lie many sophisticated features based on an entirely new platform. And, best of all, this release is just the first step in the development of the world's most comprehensive and powerful business and news resource.

Expanded Content

Business product resources are now organized into clearly labeled tabs.

View Figure 1

The Profound tab presents more than 201,000 market research reports from more than 130 respected providers, including Datamonitor, EIU, Gartner, IDC, and covering more than 70 industries worldwide. Dialog Profound also includes: Country Reports from EIU, plus Market, Investment, Country and Company Briefings. Company Briefings are now updating weekly.

The NewsRoom tab, formerly NewsLine, links to a rapidly growing news file containing 8,000 newspapers, newswires, specialty newsletters, business press sources and trade and scholarly journals. New in this release is an extended archive of major full-text newspapers covering more than 20 years. For example, the Financial Times goes back to 1982, and the Boston Globe goes back to 1979!

Additional tabs to NewsEdge, Live, Intelliscope and Company Profiles are gateways to complementary business information for current subscribers to these products.

More Robust Options

The most dramatic enhancements lie in the power and ease of finding relevant business information:

• Duplicate Removal — Automatically remove duplicate stories from your results.
  
  
• Enhanced Company Searching — Find data on specific companies easily with Company SmartTerms. Look up companies by Ticker Symbol or SIC Code. Each company is indexed using a standard name, with cross-references from variant spellings, acronyms, acquired companies, etc. More than 800,000 names for public and private companies from around the world are archived.
  
  
• Relevancy Ranking — Display search results by relevance or date.
  
  
• Sort Output — Display results in order by title or publication name, in addition to publication date.
  
  
• Limit Options — Restrict your search to one or more of 14 different languages in Dialog NewsRoom, or to Executive Summary or Section Titles in Dialog Profound.
  
  
• My Dialog — Customize the interface. Set defaults for many of the above search options, plus date display, database tab, search screens, sort order, English-only results, default e-mail delivery for your Alerts, and much more.

New and Powerful Taxonomy

SmartTerms is an expanded and improved taxonomy applied consistently to both Dialog Profound and Dialog NewsRoom, resulting in better, more relevant document retrieval.

The new taxonomy combines indexing best practices from earlier versions of Dialog Profound with that of Dialog NewsEdge. And, because SmartTerms are continuously reviewed, new terms will appear frequently for subjects, industries and companies to reflect current marketplace trends.

The SmartTerms taxonomy closely maps to the way searches are constructed for business information. Using five main content facets—subject, industry, company name, geographic location and publication name—SmartTerms delivers highly relevant results.

Clicking the SmartTerms bar lets you browse or search the taxonomy and select appropriate terms for your search.

View Figure 2

Related terms are included in the results to help refine your research by letting you see alternative and, perhaps, more pertinent topics (e.g., restaurants to fast food and bars & nightclubs). Extensive cross-referencing maps what you type to the best SmartTerm (e.g., diaper to baby clothing), variant spellings (e.g., labour to labor), acronyms (UPS to United Parcel Service, Inc.), similar terms (e.g., acquisitions to mergers & acquisitions), and even slang (e.g., big blue to IBM).

New Cost Management Tool

Dialog BillBack is a new, free Web-based application from Dialog for monitoring research costs and generating usage reports quickly and easily. Organizations that conduct research for internal purposes can track usage within various departments, while organizations that conduct research for clients can now charge back those costs. Dialog BillBack lets you set up and track costs by as many subaccounts/project codes as you wish.

Current Dialog Profound and Dialog NewsRoom User IDs and passwords are automatically enabled for access to Dialog BillBack.

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