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From the Editor

We have planned a host of events for the Special Libraries Association annual conference June 12-15, 2011, in Philadelphia. Visit us at ProQuest Dialog booth #900 to check out demonstrations of ProQuest Dialog and learn more about its new features, and be on hand to congratulate Dialog award winners at our annual ceremony. We welcome this opportunity to see and talk with our customers in person, so please do come by!

In this issue, you’ll want to read about new features of ProQuest Dialog that aid in searching biomedical research, as well as new content in EconLit, Derwent World Patents Index^® and ebrary. As always, we highlight search tips, new training courses and documentation to help you make the most of Dialog and, of course, you don’t want to miss the always entertaining, always informative Ron Kaminecki. This month, he explores the world of prior art searching.

 

 ProQuest Dialog Updates

ProQuest Dialog tools for the biomedical searcher

Whether you are a power searcher or just getting started, you will appreciate ProQuest Dialog’s latest release featuring new tools for searching MEDLINE^®, ToxFile^® and Embase^®. In Command Line search mode or using the easy menu-driven Thesaurus tool, you can search the online thesauri in these databases to find subject terms to help you broaden or narrow a search.

With a thesaurus opened, browse subject terms, or select one or more to add to your search.

• Example from MEDLINE

  Command Line search. Enter the field code followed by controlled vocabulary (Medical Subject Headings (MeSH^®) and major subject headings in MEDLINE and ToxFile and Emtree^® headings and major headings in Embase). Use qualifiers, also known as subheadings, or the corresponding two-letter codes to narrow your search.

Currently, there are 83 drug/medical qualifier terms with 19 “Quick Code” groupings, which allow you to search multiple subjects using a single abbreviation (e.g., QT for Quick Therapy including drug and diet therapy, surgery and more).

Example from Embase

With EXPLODE, find all occurrences of narrower terms in a single or multiple search statements. Enter the field code for Embase (EMB) followed by EXPLODE and the search term(s).

• Thesaurus Tool. Click the Thesaurus link to the right of the Advanced Search form. Enter your search term, add qualifiers, if desired, and click Add to Search.

In addition, EXPLODE and the ability to qualify the terms to major subjects are available as checkbox options in the thesaurus tool.

A new At a Glance module will take you step-by-step through the thesaurus and EXPLODE.

 

It’s easy on ProQuest Dialog

ProQuest Dialog™: Field searching and stacking

One of the most powerful features offered by legacy Dialog and DataStar to clients is the ability to search by specific index fields. The precision of the search fields has historically allowed users to cut through lists of results that may not accurately focus on the terms and concepts users have searched. For instance, seasoned searchers understand that relevance and occurrences of terms in strategic locations of documents are prime indicators of an article’s content. In addition, index fields for descriptors of the article, subjects, or events help indicate the main idea of an article. Also, index search fields are a mainstay when searching large sets of data.

Given the significance of precise searching, ProQuest Dialog offers several ways to obtain precision depending on your expertise. Whether you use Basic Search, Advanced Search or Command line mode, you can search key fields such as title, abstract, or subject to ensure your terms are the main topics discussed.

For example, if you are conducting a search in the Pharmaceutical & Biomedical category for symptoms of anaphylaxis, a food allergy, to find results concerning the causes and treatment, the search might look something like the strategies in the search forms below. 

• In Basic Search, enter search terms all in one line in the search box at the top of the screen.
  
  Use the Narrow Results by box on the right side of the screen to limit your search further to subject, substance, title, author, document type and date.
  
  Note: You can even stack fields e.g., ti,ab,sub(search terms) in the Easy Search box and then narrow with the filters and navigators.

• Using Advanced Search, enter one group of search terms in the first search box and limit to document title from the dropdown box to the right. Place another set of terms in the second search box, limited to the abstract.

• With Command Line mode, just enter terms using command line syntax as shown.

No matter what your level of search expertise, ProQuest Dialog has a way to meet your needs!

For more details on different types of searches, view the New Features in ProQuest Dialog on the ProQuest Dialog customer support page.

 

 June Highlights

Join Dialog at SLA festivities!

Join us at the 2011 Special Libraries Association (SLA) Annual Conference June 12-15 in Philadelphia! As a major conference sponsor, Dialog and ProQuest offer many opportunities for networking, training and learning more about Dialog and the new ProQuest Dialog service. Check your program for event times and locations. Visit the INFO-EXPO and ProQuest booth #900. And, don’t miss the following events:

Sunday, June 12, 3:00 – 3:30 p.m.,ProQuest Booth 900
Champagne Reception:
Roger K. Summit Scholarship & Information Professional Awards

Raise a glass of the bubbly with your colleagues and toast the 2011 recipient of the Roger K. Summit Scholarship. Meet inspiring examples of achievement, creativity and innovation — the future of information services — when Dialog announces this year’s Quantum² InfoStars and the winner of the Seventh Annual SLA Australia & New Zealand Chapter Information Professional of the Year Award.

Tuesday, June 14, 10:00 – 11:30 a.m., Convention Center Room 112B

Hot Topic:
Building Targeted Social Communities

Facebook dominates the “community of friends” space, but special needs and challenges exist for building targeted professional communities. This panel session will highlight examples and use crowdsourcing to explore tools, challenges and techniques for building participation and interactivity.

Speakers

• Jeff Lang, Community Manager, ProQuest
• Andy Weissberg, Managing Partner, Digital Publishing Partners
• Darrell Gunter, Chief Commercial Officer, AIP

A group site on the ProQuest DiscoverMore Ning site will be used to generate discussion before and after the panel and to display related tweets during the session.  If you can’t attend the panel in person, check out the stream by joining at http://discovermorecorps.com/ and use hashcode <#ProQuest> to send your comments and questions to the panelists and audience members during the session!

Tuesday, June 14, 9:00 p.m. – Midnight, Marriott Hotel, Salon E

Future Disco Dance Party!
Dance the night away with us at SLA’s popular DJ dancing event.

Sponsored by ProQuest and Dialog

Hosted by:
Information Technology Division
Leadership and Management Division

SLA and Dialog NOOK eReader Sweepstakes

Enter the SLA and Dialog Sweepstakes for your chance to receive one of two NOOK Color eReaders . To enter, use these quick and easy steps. (Note: If you're already a Facebook fan of Dialog LLC and SLA, skip steps 1-2.)

1. Access the Dialog LLC Page on Facebook and click the "Like" button.
2. Access the Special Libraries Association Page on Facebook and click the "Like" button.
3. In the left margin on SLA's Page, click "Sweepstakes."  At the top, click "Enter Sweepstakes" and fill out the entry form, providing an answer to the question " How has social media impacted your professional life?"
4. Click "Submit" and you're good to go!

Entries will be accepted until June 15, the last day of the SLA 2011 Annual Conference & INFO-EXPO. If you're one of the lucky winners, SLA will notify you via email on June 16, 2011.

 

Complement Dialog sources with ebrary

An excellent complementary resource to ProQuest Dialog, ebrary is a member of the ProQuest family and provides 235,700 titles for purchase with more than 1,900 e-books added in just the past month. ebrary contains innovative reference tools and a rich collection of books, journals, magazines, maps and other publications. These aggregated collections cover industries, including business and economics, computers and electronics, engineering, oil and gas, healthcare, pharmaceuticals and many others.

ebrary offers a wide variety of flexible models for acquiring e-books from trusted publishers such as Springer, Elsevier, McGraw-Hill, British Informatics Society, IOS Press, OECD, Wiley and other leading publishers. Make research quick and efficient — use ebrary’s cutting-edge technology DASH!™ to create searchable databases of your own digital materials that integrate with ebrary’s content.

ebrary Topic of the Week

To make it easier for libraries to keep their e-book collections current and timely, ebrary is pleased to introduce Topics of the Week, which highlight premium titles on hot issues hand-picked by its on-staff librarians. Such topics would be the increasingly popular issue of corporate sustainability and how to develop a successful strategy for the company, from risk management to sustainable buildings. Contact your account representative for more information about this exciting new source of information.

 

 Market: Business and News Content Updates

Historical data added to EconLit

Over 61,000 historical documents from 146 journals dating from 1886 to 1968 have just been added to EconLit (File 139). Produced by the American Economic Association (AEA), these documents from volumes 1-10 of the Index of Economic Journals include bibliographic citations, subject descriptors and subject codes, geographical descriptors and the names of historical persons from the realm of economics.

Historical data provides a basis for analyzing and comparing issues over time, for example, China has seen tremendous changes in the last century. Looking at some titles illustrates population decline and its effects on economic factors, agriculture policy contrasts and rural communes and their place in the Chinese economy, to name just a few issues.

• Who's Afraid of Population Decline? A Critical Examination of Its Consequences (January 25, 2011) and Prospects for population control (1968)
• Grain Policy: Rethinking an Old Issue for China (2010) and Subsidies and Distortions in China's Agriculture: Evidence from Producer-Level Data (2011) and Study of Agricultural Productivity and Its Convergence across China's Regions (2008)
• Changes in the rural people's communes (1961) and Transitions of Governance Mechanisms in China's Agriculture: Land Reform, the Cooperatives, the People's Commune, HRS and Agricultural Industrialization (2007)

Learn more about this new content in EconLit at the Dialog or AEA booths at the upcoming SLA Conference on June 12-15 in Philadelphia.

 

 Validate: Intellectual Property Content Updates

DWPI new coverage – Gulf Cooperation Council

The coverage in Derwent World Patents Index (DWPI^SM) and Patent Citation Index (PCI) was recently enhanced to include Granted patents published through the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) patent office. The GCC Patent Office is a regional office that registers patents in the following Member States: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, State of Qatar, State of Bahrain, State of Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Sultanate of Oman. Patents granted by the Office are recognized and enforced in all GCC Member States, and, therefore, don’t require further processing in any GCC Member State, offering a more practical route for protection in this region. This new addition increases DWPI's coverage to 45 patent authorities.

The new coverage in DWPI will include all granted patents published from 2002 onwards. DWPI titles and alerting abstracts in English are provided for records identified as basics. Any that are equivalents will join the existing DWPI patent family as normal. EPI and CPI manual codes are applied to relevant records, and other indexing (fragmentation codes, polymer indexing, DCR indexing and/or Markush Indexing) will be applied to basics classified into section A, B, C or E. The first records appeared in DWPI updates early in May. The most recently published records were loaded first, and will be followed by the backfile to 2002 over subsequent weeks. The ongoing content will be loaded as the official gazettes are made available by the GCC patent office. Patent and literature citations from the GCC records will also be captured and included in PCI (Patents Citation Index) increasing further the authority coverage of this file.

As well as coordinating efforts in the area of intellectual property, the GCC also encourages scientific and technical research in this region. Increasing levels of R&D spending and investment from companies outside of the region make it important for the GCC patents to be covered in DWPI and PCI.

The regional office’s objectives include:

• encouraging individuals to invest their ideas in the fields of production
• activating trade and industry markets by introducing quality products thereby contributing to the industrial and economic growth in the region
• publishing creative, innovative, and inventive ideas and securing their protection
• ultimately attracting foreign investment to the region by offering sufficient protection for investors.

 

A Proximal and a Distal Tip
by Ron Kaminecki, MS, CPL, JD, director, IP segment, U.S. patent attorney

Here, hold my keychain while I break this window
So, there I was, hunkered down next to a darkened basement window in a shaded area, swinging a brick wrapped in a towel, ready to break into a building when I was accosted by a person who lived next door. “Hey, did you lock yourself out of your house?” my neighbor said. Indeed, I did, and determined the only way back in was to break a window and climb through, which the two of us did without raising any more interest from other neighbors or the police.

Kind of an unconventional way of entering a premises — after all, the socially acceptable means of using a key is preferred, but that assumes one has such a clever device. So, the keyless among us must depend upon unconventional means of obtaining access, and maybe that’s a blessing. After this escapade, I made sure to have spare keys handy.

I have often referred to citation searching as akin to jumping through the bathroom window, because it is a somewhat unconventional way of doing research, even though now it is very well accepted. (Using citations, that is, not jumping through a bathroom window.) A database is structured with keywords and often with classified indexing and other standardized data like numbers or codes, but citations just sort of happen without much control by the creators of the databases. Unless you cite yourself (“According to me, I said...”), you really are at the whim of other authors for citing your work.

But what if you not only don’t have a key, but you also tried one way and it didn’t work? Citations are great, but what do you do if you don’t have any? This happens quite often in patents when you are looking at a very new technology that has not been around long enough to acquire any citations. At that point, get out the brick and the towel! Or, better yet, consider following the timeline of the invention. By timeline I mean look at the use of a specific search strategy over time and focus on the earliest use of the invention.

Complete with microscopic pencil pocket protectors
As an example, the area of nanotechnology is rich with new devices, and the inventors love to give them names that begin with the four letters: “Nano,” as in nanoengineering (brought to you by really tiny researchers in cute little lab coats), nanopharmaceuticals, even nanosurf and nanothink! Let’s focus on a relatively new invention, nanotweezers. When you search patents by this word, you find usage started rather abruptly with several patents mentioning the term as early as 2000 with no occurrences before this year. This does not mean these were the first patents with this technology, just the first to use this terminology. But, what were such devices called before someone came up with the sexy name of nanotweezers? (I know, not too sexy of a term, but we’re dealing with these really small engineers here.) Try checking the names of the assignees or the inventors who first came up with the term, or better yet, check the non-patent literature (NPL). Looking in DIALINDEX (B 411; SF ALL; S (NANOTWEEZ? OR NANO()TWEEZ?) AND PY<2000), you find the earliest use of this term in several newspaper articles right around the time of the first patents. Indeed, because newspapers carry what’s new in technology, what better place to look for some news about technology? Click the "view search" icon to the right and note this clipping from some of these articles.

Here we picked up the potential for a new term — nanochopsticks! Better, though, is we can also easily look up the backgrounds of the inventors who are mentioned to see if they have any conference papers, technical reports, etc., mentioning the new technology of nanotweezers. Indeed, one of the inventors even mentions this concept in his doctoral dissertation (click "view search" icon).

At this point I would look at the bibliography found in the dissertation to attempt to locate pertinent literature that might have an enabling disclosure — obtaining an on-target dissertation is like buying an in-depth literature search!

So, instead of using the normally-accessible means of entry, why not break into a basement, jump through a bathroom window or at least check the NPL to look for patent information outside of the normal areas? Use the earliest occurrence of a concept found in a timeline and investigate just before that period to determine what the concept was called before it got its catchy name to see if there are any other clues to earlier publications. Prior art is still prior art, no matter what window you had to smash in order to find it.

 

 Learn about ProQuest

Dig into Earth Sciences with Deep Indexing on ProQuest

If you rely on GeoRef (File 89, GEOF/GEOP) and other Geosciences [GEOSCI] databases, consider adding the ProQuest Earth Sciences Collection available through ProQuest to your research resources.

Earth Science relates to the fields including Geology, Geophysics, Soil Science and Oceanography. Practical applications can relate to monitoring of earthquakes, drilling for oil, civil engineering, monitoring volcanic activity and harnessing geothermal energy.

Essential: As the basic building block for Earth Science subscriptions, start with GeoRef on ProQuest. An abstract and index (A&I) database produced by the American Geological Society, GeoRef is available from a variety of other sources such as Dialog. The added value on ProQuest is Deep Indexing and the potential to reach full-text content.

Alongside GeoRef is GeoScience World (GSW), also produced by the American Geological Society, which is fully interoperable and complementary to GeoRef. GSW subscribers must have a current subscription to GeoRef.

ProQuest Exclusive: only ProQuest offers Deep Indexing: Earth Science, with enhanced functionality through more effective searching and over 2.6 million indexed figures and tables. It is included as standard with ProQuest’s GeoRef offering.

ProQuest Earth Science Collection

ProQuest’s Earth Science Collection comprises Deep Indexing, traditional bibliographic abstracts and ProQuest Earth Science Journals. The additional journals component in ProQuest Earth Science Journals brings well over 400 full-text titles in the Earth Science and Geology field. 

Find out how you can subscribe to the ProQuest Earth Science Collection. Contact your Dialog account representative or click here.