No mention of Ovid here that I can see. Does anyone who has the choice
of Ovid and Dialog actually prefer Dialog?
Gordon.
Gordon Smith
The Sally Howell Library
Epsom General Hospital
Dorking Road
Epsom, Surrey, KT18 7EG
Tel. 01372-735688, Fax 01372-735687
NULJ=HOWE, HLN=EP
<<Cela est bien dit>> rEpondit Candide
<<mais il faut cultiver notre jardin>>. - Voltaire.
>>> Scott Gibbens <[log in to unmask]> 16/06/2005 13:46:36 >>>
Dear All
For your information I enclose some information on the comments below,
as I
know that our Account Manager at Dialog is out of the country at the
moment
and unable to reply. The NHS has a Technical Reference Group which
works
with all our information providers in improving the service they
provide,
and as such a number of improvements are always in the pipeline.
Regards
Scott Gibbens
NHS National Core Content Manager
Dialog:
* Confusing language e.g. "link to fully indexed abstract" and not
immediately obvious what different functions do (e.g. split, rank)
SG: NHS staff have been asked what they would like "link to fully
indexed
abstract" to say instead as this text can be easily changed. I think it
is
better then "link to full reference" which most end users think means
full
text!
* Still being worked on/amended. Changes from day to day!
SG: The service it being amended and improved based on customer
feddback
and certainly does not change day to day. I would much prefer to work
with
an information provider that does respond so positively to customer
feedback
* Not very intuitive. Less obvious how to navigate through pages,
download references etc...
SG: Seems easy to me - click on next titles to see the next 20. Go to
the
bottom of the page to save, print or email.
* 2 searches are registered whenever you use thesaurus mapping (so
end up with much longer search history than necessary)
SG: The standard results and thesaurus mapping results are both shown.
I
would have thought this is a major advantage.
* Downloading references is much more complicated/time consuming.
Not immediately obvious how to go about it. Not all details of
citation
are entered into Ref man. Missed out year, and volume, issue and page
numbers.
SG: This depends on how much information you choose to download via
the
Short, Medium or Full format of records
* Often problems with links to full text journals from Dialog
SG: This is one of the issues ANY linking system will have. The term
often
implies this happens a lot - rarely would be a much better term.
* Thesaurus mapping algorithms are different. Terms are displayed
with the most common first so often get a bizarre list of terms to
choose from in Dialog, rather than relevant related terms.
SG: The Thesaurus mapping comment is often received. it should be made
clear that Dialog use standard thesaurus mapping - NOT vocaulary
mapping as
some other providers do.
* Discrepancies when exploding descriptors: selecting Explode
under Thesaurus mapping in Medline and Embase returns less results
than
if each of the related terms under all trees are selected.
SG: Reasons for this have been discussed on the NHS Core Content list
before
* Sometimes very slow. Often down.
SG: This is simply not true. We monitor ALL the core content
resources.
Dialog is the best performing of all of them and is usually only down
during SCHEDULED downtime on a Saturday morning
* No access to ACP journal club
SG: This is not a resource the NHS subscribes to and is certainly not
a
Dialog issue!
* Dialog is inadequate for systematic reviews as it can't cope
with unlimited truncation
SG: Yes it can - you just need to understand how to use the system
properly!
* Dialog is found to be fairly unresponsive, interface is too
generic for people who like to focus on Medline and some of it's
terminology can be misleading and/or confusing
SG: Is the answer to have a radically different interface to each
database -
that would be a disaster.
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