Research Solutions LexisNexis® Continuous Alerts powered by Factiva User Guide LexisNexis® Continuous Alerts is a gateway service into Factiva Tracks—continuous e-mail. It is a current awareness and alerting tool that scans articles and ‘crawls’ Web sites for news that matches a Continuous Alerts profile. The search is performed automatically and the results are returned to an Alert for continuous e-mail delivery and online viewing. Continuous Alerts — Key Facts: • Available only in legal marketplace. • Continuous Alerts is a gateway from the lexis.com® alerts tab to Factiva’s platform. It is set up with the Factiva sources using Factiva proximity connectors and indexing. • Alerts search Factiva sources only—approximately 10,000 influential news and business sources across the globe. Factiva’s source database for searching source information is available at: http://www.factiva.com/sources/search.asp?node=menuElem1523 • Results are sent directly to an e-mail address. • Results can also be viewed from the “Currently tracking” tab. • Once an Alert is set up, results will start being received in about 30 minutes. • Articles remain in Alerts archive for 14 days or until 250 documents have accumulated, whichever comes first. • When the document limit is reached, the oldest articles are deleted as new articles are delivered. Continuous Alerts Set Up Select sources: Users access Continuous Alerts on lexis.com via the Factiva sources: Continuous Alert subtab under the Alerts tab. Some content available in search is not available in Users will see an explanatory page when first selecting Continuous Alerts. This includes discontinued publications the Continous Alert tab and click Continue at the where only older articles are available and some publications bottom of the page. The first time a new user enters the whose publishers do not permit their distribution in Alerts. Continous Alert application, they will be asked to enter Also, if the lag time is over 30 days, the publication is not their name, company and email address and accept available in Alerts to prevent you from receiving dated Factiva’s terms and conditions. On subsequent visits, the headlines. If, while setting up an Alerts, a source is selected application will remember this information. that is unavailable, you can still proceed and create the folder. A Continuous Alert is created in the “Set up new Continuous Aert” tab. A search is conducted to set up a Continuous Alert. The search can be modified before you start the Alerts tracking. Alerts can be set up even if you receive no results from the search. Enter search terms: • Utilizes the Factiva search proximity connectors. See the Factiva Connectors section below for additional details. • Note that the “!” term is not used in Factiva. • Factiva platform does not recognize segment Continuous Alerts will automatically search all Factiva searching, for instance, company (ibm) will merely sources, but you can also limit by industry. Industry retrieve stories that have the words “company” and categories appear when you select the Source. You can “ibm.” Use the company indexing tool to take select industry source by clicking on the industry, which advantage of Factiva company indexing. populates the box at the right. You can search for specific sources, such asThe Wall Street Journal. Factiva also has group codes that can be added to your search to run against particular types of sources, for instance, U.S. newspapers, wires, etc., similar to LexisNexis group files. A list of these codes, along with underlying sources for the most popular groups is included in the attached spreadsheet. If you wish to add your own Boolean keywords, such as not, click the arrow to the right of the category, which will populate the keyword search box. In addition, if you wish to reuse custom source combinations you have created in future searches, by populating the sources into keyword box via the arrow, you can copy and paste your custom source selections into other searches. 2 Research Solutions Select indexing: Subject includes Editor’s Choice to provide Factiva editor-selected results from a variety of categories, such as Factiva Intelligent Indexing™ is used for Company, Media, Construction, Securities, and more. Subject, Industry, and Region. It is implemented universally across the entire Factiva content set in all languages. • Language content is available in the 22 languages listed Select the category and can enter keywords to find indexing terms. Simply click to enter your selections to the right and Search for free-text terms in: select and/or radio buttons. For additional Boolean options, • Full article click the arrow button at the right of the blue hyperlinked • Headline and Lead Paragraph results to populate the keyword search box. • Headline • Author Note: this only applies to search terms. It does not apply with the indexing Search Content: • Factiva content and/or • 550+ Web news content Date range for initial Alerts search results: • Last day • Last week • Last month Note: the search is limited to the last 30 days as this is designed to “test” the Alerts. Exclude: Republished news: Excludes newswire stories that are picked up by other publications, as well as articles printed in the various editions of The Wall Street Journal. (This does not include articles published on the Dow Jones Newswires.) For example, the New York Times sometimes runs Associated Press articles. Since the AP wire is available in near real-time on Factiva, the Times item would be regarded as a republished. Another example would be when The Wall Street Journal runs story that first ran in the Wall Street Journal Europe or Wall Street Journal Asia. Recurring pricing and market data: Excludes intra-day market reports, primarily from wire services. Excluded articles may also be related to debt, equity, foreign exchange, fund and commodity prices. 3 Obituaries, sports, calendars…: Delivery Options Excludes obituaries, calendars of events, letters, diaries, weather items, food and cooking stories, sports and Alert Name: recreation news, and birth, marriage and death Select up to 25 characters for a name. This is a required announcements. field and needs to be filled in before a search can be conducted. Send results to: Relevance Level Type in Email address Relevance ranking measures the similarity between the Results display format: search terms and the documents being searched. Headlines with lead sentences (with link to full text) Text documents Note: This ONLY applies to key words in the search Full text with Indexing box and not indexing. In addition, the relevance rating applies to your email results only, not to the Email format: initial search results you see. Relevancy is Plain text automatically set at the lowest level during your HTML initial search results. You can then sort your results by Mobile relevancy level to get a feel for the level of relevancy you will need for your email alerts. Upon making selections, you’ll submit and see results at which point you can edit your search or click Start Tracking to begin your Alert service. The search updates The relevance score is a combination of three factors: and charges will continue every day until searches are deleted. 1. The number of terms included in the query and how many of the search terms are found in a document. Example: Alert 1 contains the terms “software or computer,” and Alert 2 contains “software or computer or internet.” The relevance score for a given document containing the terms “software” and “internet” would be lower for Alert 1, because the document satisfied only one “evidence” of terms in Alert 1 and two “evidences” of terms in Alert 2. Start Tracking button in red begins the Alert. 2. The number of times any term appears in an article. Example: If one of the free-text terms is “Airbus,” an article containing that term multiple times would score higher than an article containing it only once. 3. The word count of a document Example: If “De Beers” appears twice in a document with 100 words and twice in an item with 300 words, You will receive notifiction that search was successfully created. the first document will receive a higher score. The longer the article, the more times a search term needs to appear to receive the same score. 4 Research Solutions FAQ’s BlackBerry/Mobile Device Delivery In addition to setting the proper format for delivery to a 1. How can an Alert be refined? mobile device, you’ll also need to take the following step in the My Delivery section so that the links will work If you are receiving too many documents or don’t get the properly in your mobile device. results you are expecting in the Alerts: • Select Factiva Intelligent Indexing—using Factiva Intelligent Set Up a Mobile Login Indexing is one of the best ways to make sure the items 1) Click the “My Details” link near the upper right you retrieve are truly about a particular company, industry, region or subject. of the page. • Search fewer sources—limit your search to 2) Click the “Set up mobile login” link. Publications only or Web sites only or you create a Custom 3) Select and copy the link in the pop-up window to an Source List that includes just the sources email addressed to your mobile device. you want. 4) When you receive the email on your mobile device, • Exclude certain types of stories—from the main click the link in the email to start receiving your alerts set up screen select some exclude items. Example: Republished news. on your mobile device. • Use Editor’s Choice—is designed to give you a quick sense of the current state of an industry. It covers 25 industries with a limited selection of trend stories, analyses, commentary, profiles and overviews.