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[ Home | Addresses | Directories | Research Reports | Help ] Resource Informagen™ - Two Types of Searching
Search by Category
Each of the different elements of the research reports can be searched for the occurrence of particular keywords or phrases. For example, the keyword "AIDS" might appear in the fields for mission statement, agreements, clinical trials, or products. To get an exhaustive list of all of the companies working in AIDS, each of these categories must be searched separately. To identify a particular company, it is oftentimes necessary to perform only one search in the mission statement field, for example. To understand what information exists in the various fields, review "Elements of a Research Report".
Index Searching
The online version of Resource Informagen has over 30,000 indexed terms to aid in the speed of searching. Indexing research reports is the most difficult aspect of creating a searchable database. Software programs which "automatically" index do not give any weighted value to a particular term. Such programs create enormous lists under terms such as "diagnostic" or "immunological" or "DNA" which are of limited use. A user is more interested in asking a specific question, such as "Which companies are involved in using RNA, DNA or ribozymes in therapeutic applications?" These users are not interested in reviewing every company working with DNA or designated as therapeutic or pharmaceutical.
The best indexes are those which are created manually with human thought and insight. Such indexes contain a significant amount of research and analysis supporting the index terms. These value-added indexes are the type which Resource Informagen contains.
We make the Research Reports themselves available online first and then the reports are indexed. Searching in the index field is simpler than searching category fields. However, for a newly released database, the category fields will be up-to-date, while the index fields will be delayed until the research reports are completely indexed.
Using Wildcards in Searches
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