ProQuest Dialog looking sharp
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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The first commercial information products I professionally trained on were Dialog and DataStar. For most of us in the information world, using these products was a rite of passage as a professional.

Excellent content aside, Dialog and DataStar could sometimes be confusing, difficult and unwieldy products to understand and were not particularly user friendly. But now the new and improved ProQuest Dialog STM release has stepped up to the plate. This new product retains the quality, depth and breadth of content but offers better flexibility, manoeuvrability and equality of accessibility for different user groups and levels of users.

ProQuest Dialog is aimed at organisations and sectors that rely on high quality, up-to-date and timely information for research and development purposes. Very simply – the content is high quality and search results can be managed and shared in ways that can make a difference to an organisation’s focus and goals.

STM content is arranged across nine industry verticals where you will find the crème de la crème of databases. Medline, Embase, SciSearch, CAB Abstracts, PASCAL, Gale Group PROMT, BIOSIS, Foodline and Toxfile, to name a few. If you like multifile searching across databases, you’ve got it. Fine tuning a search in a single database? Easy peasy.

One of favourite features is the “My Research” space. This workspace allows the filtered content – your search results – to break free to become valuable knowledge supporting organisational goals. It can be shared, distributed and tagged in a way that all searchers expect today. In my opinion the My Research workspace lifts the product in a way that I was not expecting.

This is more than just a new paint job for an old product. It feels ready and raring to go, and with an energy that we as searchers demand these days. In some ways ProQuest Dialog is an extraordinary product because it has retained what was great about the old products – excellent content and the ability to do detailed searches. But it feels fresh and inviting for all levels of users. It is quite amazing that it has only taken two years of development to get to this point.

A word of warning: although quite straightforward and user-friendly, spend some time getting to know this product and the extent of its capabilities. You will be rewarded.

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