Project Management
Searching Factiva
Open database
Factiva.com is a full text current affairs and company information database. It includes major newspapers, news wire services and business journals world wide. Go to Databases for Project Management, find Factiva.com on the list and click on the name.Search
Enter your search words into the Free text box. You should use and to combine different terms. For more information, go back to the previous part of this tutorial, or study the Examples in Factiva.Use the date dropdown to limit to the last week, last month, or other appropriate option.
Use the indexing facility to filter your search, especially by source, region, company, and/or language. Source refers to the publications you are searching.
Click Source in the left side menu, then click the dropbox for Select Source Category. For example you can select Publications - By Region, then highlight Australia and New Zealand. You can even select individual sources. Continue the process of selecting sources until you come to the individual titles, eg. The Sydney Morning Herald. You may apply other filters, such as Language.
If you set the Search for free-text terms in: dropdown to Headline and Lead Paragraph, you may find more relevant results than searching in the full article. Run Search.
Edit, refine, focus your search
Take a brief look at the results. Do the titles look relevant? Are there too many, not enough or none (see near top of screen for the number of results)? You may need to go back and refine your search. Click MODIFY SEARCH at the top. Check your spelling. If you found too few, you could truncate your search term/s, for instance ethic* will find more results than ethics or ethical. If you found too many, consider adding extra search terms, combining with AND.Results
The results will display in headlines format, including title, date, source, wordcount.
Find the full text of article
Click on the title to display the full text. If using frames, you will see a split screen with the full text on the right, as in the example above. If you click NO FRAMES, the full text will be displayed in a new window.Save, print or email results
You can save, print or email the full article, including the citation details. Select the article/s you want, using the checkboxes. Make sure the View as window near the top displays Full Article. Click on the relevant icon above the headline display and follow the prompts.Company news and financial information
Use the Companies/Markets tab in the green bar at the top. Search by symbol or name; for example linux will find Bluepoint Linux Software Corp, with BLPT.OB as its symbol.
Remember to logout when you are finished.The next part of the tutorial will look at Compendex.
