Dialog Solutions

Dialog offers powerful automated monitoring of strategic information (alerting) for all your workflows (competitive and business intelligence, drug safety, product management, research & development and much more).  Dialog alerts have served our clients efficiently and reliably for many years. 

The Dialog Customer Experience Training and Support team offers an extended consultative service for alerts management.     Our consultants are able to support you during the entire process of creating and testing strategies, setting up and maintaining your alerts.  And using our Alerts Manager in the new and enhanced Workspace, you can manage your alerts yourself more efficiently than ever before.   Discover how the Dialog Alerts work in this page.

Publication Date (PD) – Date an information provider specifies as their publication date.

First Available Date (FAV) – Date that a record is first available on ProQuest Dialog for searching.

Update Date (UD) – Date that ProQuest loads a vendor-provided update to a record.

The first time a record is loaded on ProQuest it will receive that date for both the First Available search field (FAV) and for the Update Date (UD) mnemonic. On any subsequent information provider update, an additional date will be loaded to the Update Date field. The Update Date field can have multiple values. Thus the Update field will contain the first date the record is available for searching on ProQuest Dialog plus the dates of any additional information provider updates. NOTE: Annual vendor reloads are not processed by the alerting engine, thus these items will not appear in your alerts.

Alert Memory - this is the record of all documents delivered from the creation of the alert. The alert memory has no limits.

Alert History - this is the record of all delivery events. This includes the email date/time, number of records and recipients, and this information lasts for 180 days on ProQuest,  whereas, copies of the emails are stored at ProQuest for 90 days.

Accession Number - is a unique ID assigned to every document by the database provider.

ProQuest Identification Nr - is a unique ID assigned by ProQuest as soon as the document arrives regardless of its database so that every record is uniquely identifiable.            

The PQ Identification nr is different from the Accession Nr assigned by the database provider.   An updated document keeps the same” Accession Number” as the original document and also retains the same ProQuest Identification Nr. 

 1 - An alert is created on day X

 This is the “Alert creation date” and the start of the Alert “memory”

  Note :            The Alert memory is kept as long as the alert is active.

  The number of documents in the memory is unlimited.

  2 - All the documents that come into the system from that date onwards

will be matched against the Alert strategy and the Alert memory.

           The documents are matched to the strategy at the time the document is loaded into PQ Dialog.

  3 - At the time the document matches the strategy,

the system stores each document delivered with a unique “ProQuest Identification Nr”

that is then stored in the Alert memory.

  4 - Documents are loaded onto ProQuest Dialog in a continuous  flow.

The system will check the “ProQuest Identification Nr” and every document matching your Alert strategy will be delivered the next time your  Alert runs at the frequency specified (daily, weekly monthly, etc.)  unless a document with the same “ProQuest Identification Nr” (or a duplicate of that document if you have chosen the deduplication option) is already in the Alert memory.

  5 - When the Alert runs, it will deliver every document matching the Alert strategy that was:

(A) loaded onto ProQuest since the previous delivery and (B) not delivered in a previous delivery.

These documents are either new documents or updated documents. It is possible to further limit the content deliver in the alert by selecting one of the parameters below, in the Include option.

HOW TO DEFINE ALERT PREFERENCES USING THE “INCLUDE” OPTION

  A.    “Newly published documents only” 

• only the documents matching the strategy, that have been recently loaded on ProQuest Dialog with a publication date within the last 60-90 days, will be delivered (this is an internal publication date filter that is increased by one day starting at 60 days on the first of the month, increasing to 90 days by the end of the month, and resetting to 60 days on the first of the next month).

• the documents can either be new to the ProQuest Dialog system or documents updated by the information provider that have not been delivered previously but which have a publication date within the last 60-90 days.

As an alternative, if a different date limiter than the 60-90 previous days is needed, the option “Newly added documents including historical items”  can be selected and a publication date limiter in the search strategy can be added.

E.g. to receive all content published after January 1, 2014, add PD(>20140101) in the last set of the strategy.

B.    “Newly added documents including historical items”

• all new or updated documents (as above) will be delivered
• plus
• “historical” records published with any publication date that match the strategy and have not been delivered previously.

If needed, a limit to the content delivered can be added by including a publication date limiter to your strategy. See example above.

Please Note:

• In both cases, if a document has previously been delivered by an alert, it will not be delivered again due to the Alert memory.
• However, an updated record can be received if indexing has been added that causes the document to match the alert strategy when the original record would not.

Practical cases :

       1 - You wish to get newly loaded or updated documents published in the last 60-90 days

• Do not limit your last set
• Select “Newly Published Documents only”

       2 - You wish to receive any new or updated documents loaded onto PQ Dialog from a certain date onwards, regardless of publication date.

[Note that “new” in this context means “new to the PQ Dialog platform”. We often receive “older” records from information providers during annual reload processes.]

• Do not limit your last set
• Select the parameter  “Newly added documents including historical items”

      3 - You wish to get newly loaded or updated documents published after a specific date

• Limit your last set to
  • S# AND pd(>=yyyymmdd) 
  • S# AND yr(>=yyyy)
• Select “Newly Added Documents including Historical items”

DUPLICATE DETECTION IN THE PROQUEST DIALOG ALERTS

• De-duplication is applied against a single alert or RSS feed in real time as the alert is processed

• The default setting is to have duplicate items removed

• Duplicates are identified comparing the following information (Greek symbols are normalized in the algorithm to improve detection):
  • article title,
  • publication title,
  • publication year
• All content that comes into the PQ Dialog alert system from the day the alert is created is matched against the strategy and history.
  1. If a document matches the strategy and has not been delivered previously, it will be delivered and the “ProQuest Identification Number” is stored in the alert history.
  2. If a document matches the strategy and the “ProQuest Identification Number” is in the history, it will not be delivered.
  3. If a document matches the strategy with a different “ProQuest Identification Number” but is considered a duplicate after comparing article title, publication title, and publication year, it will not be delivered.