Dow Jones released a new business resource this week in their offering for small businesses and individuals, Wall Street Journal Professional Edition. Wall Street Journal’s website, WSJ.com, has been combined with Factiva to offer business news and information. According to an October 21, 2009 press release the key features include:
- Aggregated news and information from more than 17,000 global sources — a significant portion of which are not available on the public Web — along with The Wall Street Journal, supported by more than 2,000 Dow Jones journalists in 84 bureaus worldwide
- Factiva SmartSearchTM, which provides a one-year archive of Factiva’s global business sources and a two-year archive of wsj.com content, filtered and sorted to reveal the best, highest-value results
- Search results that are instantly analyzed to uncover issues, industries, companies, people and ideas buried beneath the headlines and displayed in know-at-a-glance graphical format
- More than 30 industry-specific pages, managed by a team of Dow Jones editors to deliver the most current insight and identify emerging trends
- Six key industry sections that are continuously managed by Wall Street Journal editors who select news and information from across Factiva’s vast archive: Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, Energy, Media & Marketing, Telecommunications and Technology
- Custom News that allows users to personalize their own home page to quickly surface the news they want on issues, companies, industries or editor-chosen “deep dives”
- User-defined alerts to deliver the latest news and information when and how it is needed
Barbara Quint of Information Today, Inc. reported the release in ITI’s Newsbreak yesterday, November 5th. She wrote, “The price will run $49 a month or about $600 a year; that will include access to full-text articles for no additional transactional pricing, unlike the $2.95 per article paid under most other Factiva subscriptions.”
Additional commentaries on the WSJ Pro Edition have conjectured that the product is intended to compete with Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. The new resource has been released for businesses this month with a release to consumers in January 2010.
Contributed by Bonnie Jordan*
In an uncharacteristic move, I agreed to a phone/webex demo of Global Markets Direct, a market research intelligence database, after receiving a cold call from the product sales manager. I was impressed!
The company reports are not merely a regurgitation of factual data. There are several pages of detailed SWOT analysis, plus financial and trend forecasting. If they do not have a report on the company you are looking for, you can submit a request and their researchers will create a report (SWOT analysis and all) within 72 hours. I did this on a Friday and received the report on Monday. Nothing about it seemed rushed or less thought-out. The quality of my “on demand” report was just as high as the pre-made ones.
I scheduled another online demo with people from our Marketing department and they LOVE it. It is a great complement to West Monitor reports and basic company reports like Hoovers. As with many (most?) databases, they have less coverage of smaller private companies than larger companies or public companies. They do include non-U.S. companies as well.
The price originally quoted to me was very reasonable when I compared it to what we were paying for other business databases. The least expensive option was password access for two specific users (cannot share passwords). They also offer firmwide access for a higher price, which I also thought was reasonable. The Library splits the cost 50-50 with Marketing.
The drawback is that it does not have a great search interface or any sort of browse feature. The only search box is the Company Name field. The other fields are drop-down menus (such as Industry, Public/Private, location) so you cannot do any keyword searches.
I am very happy with this database and think it is well worth the money.
*Bonnie Jordan, Research Librarian, Lindquist & Vennum LLP.
Check out the redesigned PubMed description. Changes include streamlined homepage, enhanced summary results, and new filters, limits, and related items. Additionally, the format display and advanced search functions has been redesigned. Click on the PubMed graphic to go to the newly designed site. Note that online training is available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/pubmed.html.
